Minorities, Violence, and Peace Research

Over the last decade we can observe a growing political and cultural renaissance of minority consciousness: US Blacks and now the Indians, the Kurds subdivided in three different countries, the Scots and the Welsh, but religious minority identifications as well — from Philippine Muslims to Northern Irish Catholics. Switzerland, one of the most sophisticated countries in dealing with ethnic diversity, recently had to grant another minority a new canton, the Jura, but only after years of political conflict marked by — among other things — terrorist violence. The rise of so many minorities to general socio-political consciousness tends to be accompanied by 'terrorism' as apparently the only effective way to be heard in a society of nation-states. The desperate plea of the Palestinians over the years is the most dramatically known case, recently involving political partisans within metropolitan countries in similar acts of violence and/or terrorism. Behind this phenomenon lies some thing structural which goes far beyond immediate grievances: it is a challenge to the modem nation-state and a form of mediated class consciousness which challenges social inequalities differently from in the past. We are likely to experience even more national and inter national violence/terrorism along ethnic/religious/racial lines, so long as those coincide with socio-economic inequalities and discriminations. And this in turn seems unavoidable.