America Magazine: The problem of violence in the modern world

First, the concept of ethnicity itself is a distinctively modern idea. Borrowing from Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and Benedict Anderson, Lange defines ethnicity in terms of a subnational “communal identity” and “collective consciousness” based on an imagined common culture and shared descent. Like national identity, ethnicity enabled people to envision themselves as part of the same community even though they “do not know most co-ethnics, commonly have major cultural differences, and rarely share blood ties.” In turn, the move from ethnic consciousness to ethnic violence depends on having a sense of “ethnic obligation” to one’s own in-group and “emotional prejudice” (for example, hate, anger, jealousy, fear and envy) against the ethnic out-group. [...]

Another modern concept, the nation-state, stands especially implicated in the rise of ethnic violence. Twentieth-century “ethnicized nation-states” were especially brutal. One thinks here of the ethno-national mythos of the Nazis’ “German volk,” Slobodan Milosevic’s “Greater Serbia” or Rwanda’s “Hutu Republic.” In turn, the modern nation-state model is linked to the idea of communal self-rule. This has created great instability and, often, violence in ethnically plural states, exacerbated by the fact that two-thirds of the world’s ethnic communities were excluded from political power between 1946 and 2005. [...]

A final important if more ambiguous point concerns Lange’s treatment of religion. For Lange, organized religion has been one of the key factors in mobilizing in-groups and out-groups in both premodern and modern times. (What Lange means by “organized religion” is less clear, especially since he simultaneously locates its roots in both biblical and modern times). Lange assigns considerable responsibility to Christian missionaries for creating ethnic consciousness among groups, including the Karen in Myanmar, the Assam in India or the Tutsi in Rwanda. In their determination to “convert and control,” missionaries often empowered marginalized community groups, reversing social hierarchies through Western education and thereby “politicizing” ethnicity. My own past studies of Rwanda bear out many of Lange’s claims.

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