Article

Ethnic Conflict and Political Institutions

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Abstract

Reviews the book, Can Democracy Be Designed: The Politics of Institutional Choice in Conflict-Torn Societies edited by Sunil Bastian and Robin Luckham (2003). This book is very much on the political science side of this divide. It has little to say about the psychological components of conflict in ethnically divided societies, other than formal political arrangements do not easily eliminate the psychological basis of longstanding ethnic conflicts. Nevertheless, this book should help psychologists to more fully understand the possibilities for conflict resolution by complementing research focused, for example, on cognitive, motivational, and social-psychological and indeed learning (stimulus-response) aspects of conflicts. The book will be of greatest interest to specialists on these parts of the world. In the aggregate, the book's chapters help place country-specific developments in theoretical debates about the ability of formal political arrangements to reduce conflict. Psychologists will miss much more micro-level discussions of how institutions and the struggle for power shape individual-level behavior, an issue that is of concern to increasing numbers of political scientists. But the book makes a compelling case that the broader political environment can create milieus that are more or less supportive of political violence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

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