Fire With Water

The Scariest Thing In The World

Over at The American Interest, Walter Russell Mead has a new post about an increasing trend towards identity wars across the world, and the prospect that they may be a “natural” step in the modernizing of societies.

One of the biggest questions in world politics today is whether identity wars (conflicts between groups with different cultural, religious and/or ethnic backgrounds who inhabit the same stretch of land) were a special feature of modern European and Middle Eastern history or whether these conflicts will appear in more of Africa and Asia in the 21st century as development spreads.  Are identity wars a fundamental aspect of the modernization process or did they arise out of specific European and Middle Eastern characteristics that don’t apply elsewhere in the world?

Its an interesting argument. But Joshua Keating offers up some wise skepticism on the details. 

Mead uses two current examples to illustrate this trend: the uptick in religious violence in Nigeria and the persecution of the Uzbek minority in Kyrgyzstan. These are, without a doubt, disturbing developments, but are they really something altogether new in regional history?….

Overall, statistics on war casualties have been trending downward in the opening years of this century. That doesn’t mean this promising trend will continue or that the current ethnic tensions in places like Nigeria and Kyrgyzstan aren’t a prelude to a much larger global calamity, I’m just not sure I buy that ethnic conflict was ever a uniquely European or Middle Eastern phenomenon.