Ethnic Conflict: When States Are No Longer Respected to Determine Society's Behavior

As several of the previous have been discussing ethnicity and ethnic conflict, and as I have been reading them, the question that came to mind was that of identity politics. Why do people choose to align themselves with ethnic, tribal, religious, or other non-state in-groups instead of the state apparatus? And this seemed to relate to Migdal's discussion on who a society deems the authority on directing acceptable social behavior, on creating the societal institutions that mold individual behavior.

Migdal describes the modern state as being a phenomenon in that it is a phase in history in which the state is generally accepted without little question as the ultimate authority on societal behavior and directing that. Problems of ethnic, or really any conflict that is intra-state rather than inter-state seems to be connected to a rejection of the given state apparatus as this authority. This is a large source of societal outliers: those who deem religion or some other force more legitimate than the state in directing behavior.

And even if the majority of individuals are not naturally of this ilk, I think what the film about Bosnia illustrated was that the threats of war and the virus of fear can cause us to easily latch on to those in-group identities that oppose that over-arching authority of the state. I think that is similar to one of the previous blog's discussion of the rebound effects of "ethnic coding". When the cause of a conflict is deemed to be due to opposing ethnic in-groups, even if that is not the cause, these identities are very easy to latch on to.

Relating back to the idea of strong states and weak societies however, I think that the ability of states to be strong (to provide the necessary resources as they deem appropriate) is what really influences people to align or not align themselves with a view of ultimate state-based authority. As in the film, where the people were so isolated from the central government and had to turn to their own civil societal resources and strengths, if the government is not able to provide security and safety then the people will no longer view the state as that primary authority of determining societal behavior.

Ultimately, I think this is easily boiled down to a simpler question of how these in-groups gain levels of accepted authority higher than the state and where the individual citizen's acceptance of that authority comes from: from some personal background cause or from imposed views of biased outsiders?