Asymmetry and Power: Can Ethnic Dominance Minimize Conflict?

This discussion piece argues that situations in which there are two similarly strong contestants (Symmetry) are often marked by long and expensive struggles for advantage and power. In contrast, an arrangement in which only one party gets access to all/most resources (Asymmetry) can minimize the cost/incidence of such struggles. For example, in their heydays, the Roman, Soviet, Habsburg, and Osman empires effectively reduced arms-races and armed conflict among their ethnic constituents. The Pax Romana was a powerful argument in favor of one-group dominance. The costliness of power struggles is determined both endogenous and exdogenously. For example, while minorities can spend resources to arm themselves, their ability to fight depends also on such factors as terrain, the effectiveness of available weapons, and their role as offender or defendor. I would argue that the Bosnian conflict was so costly precisely because the Bosnian terrain largely neutralized the arms advantage of the Serb faction. However, one should not take too narrow a view, because there are also forces making asymmetry more costly. Achieving or maintaining dominance (especially against forces/struggles from within-possibly among symmetrically similarly powerful lobbyists) can be expensive and distort incentives. Further, if dominance permits genocide, it may indeed occur. The potential exploitation of the loser may crystallize the opposition-indeed, there is a common notion that “oppression” and violations of “fairness” can lead to strong efforts by the weaker party. If the audience is to come away with any insights from this piece (and few of the arguments are really new), it is simply that helping a weaker party in the interest of “fairness” as the U.S. has done in the case of many of its interventions, can potentially escalate and prolong conflicts to the point where no intervention, or even intervention on the part of the stronger party’s side, would have been better for all parties involved.