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Partition as a Solution to Ethnic
Conflict
Costantino Pischedda
Published online: 20 Nov 2008.
To cite this article: Costantino Pischedda (2008): Partition as a Solution to Ethnic Conflict, The
International Spectator: Italian Journal of International Affairs, 43:4, 103-122
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Partition as a Solution to Ethnic Conflict
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Costantino Pischedda
Over the past 60 years, civil wars have been more frequent, have lasted longer and
have caused many more casualties and displacements than inter-state wars.1
Consequently, the body of research devoted to understanding the dynamics of
civil conflict has grown significantly. Following the end of the Cold War, a series
of high profile clashes (Bosnia, Rwanda and Kosovo) drew the attention of both
policymakers and scholars to civil wars fought along ethnic lines. However, key
questions on how third parties should intervene to end ethnic violence most
effectively remain unsolved.
This article examines the existing evidence on the effectiveness of a specific
strategy to terminate ethnic war:2 partition, intended as separation of groups in
conflict into ethnically homogeneous areas capable of self-defence and enjoying
some form of self-government (ranging from regional autonomy to formal independence).3 Partition has become increasingly important in policy circles, as several
observers have proposed it as the ultimate solution to the ongoing ethno-sectarian
war in Iraq.4 In addition, it has for years been at the core of debate on the future of
the Balkans as well as of Georgia’s breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South
Ossetia.
Costantino Pischedda is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science, Columbia University, NY.
The author would like to thank Leslie Hough, Alan Kuperman and Francesco Moro for helpful comments
on a previous draft. Any errors that remain are his sole responsibility. Email: [email protected]
1
See, for example, Fearon and Laitin ‘‘Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War’’, 75.
2
In this article, as in the bulk of the relevant literature, ‘‘ethnic civil war’’ is deemed to be an intra-state war
between groups with distinct ascriptive characteristics (e.g., race, a myth of common descent, culture,
ethnicity, language or religion), in contrast to ideological civil wars, in which the main cleavage is along
political and ideological lines.
3
The term partition is used here in a broad sense, including partition proper (according to one definition:
a separation agreed by the parties or imposed on them by a powerful external actor) and secession
(separation due to the unilateral act of a rebellious ethnic group) because the fundamental conflict
resolution logic of partition should apply regardless of the degree of consensuality of separation. For an
overview of definitions of partition and secession, see O’Leary, ‘‘Analysing Partition’’.
4
Joseph Biden (Democratic Senator for the state of Delaware and Barack Obama’s running mate for the
2008 US presidential elections) has probably been the most vocal advocate among policymakers of de facto
partition in Iraq (see Biden, ‘‘Breathing Room’’). For more analytical arguments in support of partition
in Iraq, see, among others, Kaufmann, ‘‘Living Together after Ethnic Killing’’, and Joseph and O’Hanlon,
The Case for Soft Partition in Iraq.
The International Spectator, Vol. 43, No. 4, December 2008, 103–122 ISSN 0393-2729 print/ISSN 1751-9721 online
ß 2008 Istituto Affari Internazionali
DOI: 10.1080/03932720802486480
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104
C. Pischedda
The focus on partition’s effectiveness in terminating war is not meant to deny
the importance of normative concerns about the demise of multi-cultural societies, the human suffering associated with large-scale population movements or the
prohibition in international law on forced migration. Yet, in adopting a consequentialist point of view, it is contended that these legitimate concerns pale
in the face of the large-scale loss of human life often associated with continued
ethnic violence and that the net number of lives saved through the adoption of a
given strategy of humanitarian intervention (in this case international support
for partition) should be the primary criterion for assessing its morality. In any
case, regardless of the normative approach subscribed to, clarifying what is
already known about the effectiveness of partition and what requires further
investigation is essential for an informed policy debate and responsible
policymaking.
This article addresses three specific questions concerning partition. The first is
whether and under what circumstances it is an effective strategy of ethnic war
termination. Effectiveness here is necessarily a relative concept, to be assessed by
comparison to alternative solutions such as power-sharing, which may be more
appealing to the international community and appear to be more humane. The
second question is whether the benefits of partition, where it is adopted, can offset
the risk of generating incentives for minorities elsewhere to rebel. Finally, there is
the issue of whether dividing opposing ethnic groups into sovereign states (de jure
partition) is a better strategy than merely achieving physical separation of the
groups within the same state (de facto partition). These questions are examined
in turn below, after a brief presentation of the main tenets of the partition argument. The final section highlights possible directions for further research and
discusses the policy implications of the main findings.
The partition argument
Perhaps the most influential (and controversial) work on partition as a strategy of
ethnic conflict resolution has been carried out by Chaim Kaufmann.5 According to
Kaufmann, after a certain threshold of violence (which he unfortunately does not
clearly identify) is reached, opposing ethnic groups cannot be reconciled and live
peacefully together under a common political authority. This is a consequence of
the so-called hardening of ethnic identities, due to both ultra-nationalist mobilisation rhetoric and real atrocities committed during the conflict. Once radicalised,
Kaufmann affirms, individual loyalties tend to be much less flexible in ethnic
conflicts than in ideological ones; the political clout of nationalist hardliners
5
See, in particular, Kaufmann, ‘‘Possible and Impossible Solutions’’ and ‘‘When All Else Fails’’.
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Partition as a Solution to Ethnic Conflict
105
opposed to any form of reconciliation is reinforced and thus cross-ethnic appeals
as a solution to the war are likely to fail.6
In addition, Kaufmann argues that ethnic civil wars provoke acute security
dilemmas. Large-scale ethnic violence leads to the emergence of a situation of
‘‘anarchy’’, in which ethnic communities can no longer rely on state authority
for protection, and therefore need to mobilise to defend themselves. However,
under conditions of anarchy, mobilisation efforts – in which nationalist appeals
play a crucial role – for defensive purposes are hard to discern from aggressive
moves. This risks generating an action-reaction dynamic, leading to a spiral of
tensions and hostilities.
Population settlement patterns play a crucial role in this escalatory dynamic,
because intermingled groups face both defensive vulnerabilities and offensive
opportunities. Intermingling generates incentives for both sides to rescue their
co-ethnics behind enemy lines and at the same time to expel enemy civilians
pre-emptively from territory under their control. While isolated and poorly
armed civilians are easy targets for ragtag ethnic militias, a concentrated and
homogeneous population is easier to defend.7 Thus the parties in conflict will
have an incentive to go on the offensive and the war will continue until the
groups are essentially separated.8
Given the asserted impossibility of reconciling ethnic factions, Kaufmann sees
only three ways to end ethnic wars: (1) military victory by one side, which leads to
the establishment of a clear ethnic ‘‘hierarchy’’; (2) third-party military occupation
enforcing inter-ethnic peace; and (3) physical separation of the contending ethnic
groups in ethnically homogeneous and militarily defensible areas (i.e., partition).
Power-sharing strategies aiming at creating institutional arrangements in which
ethnic groups previously engaged in violence against each other share political
authority over the same territory are doomed to fail.
Kaufmann supports his argument by presenting a database of all ethnic civil wars
resolved between 1944 and 1994 (27 cases).9 He argues that none of them ended
with a power-sharing agreement, but instead with either: (1) military victory,
(2) outside intervention, (3) partition or (4) regional autonomy with the crucial
6
See Kalyvas, ‘‘Ethnic Defection in Civil War’’, for an empirical critique of the notion of rigidity of ethnic
identities in civil war.
7
Barry Posen (‘‘The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict’’) was the first to adapt the notion of the
security dilemma in international relations to interactions between ethnic groups within states. Posen
presents the security dilemma as a cause of ethnic civil war in the aftermath of the collapse of multiethnic states (e.g. the Soviet Union). Kaufmann subsequently applied Posen’s insights more generally to the
study of the dynamics of ethnic civil war, emphasizing the security dilemma as a crucial obstacle to war
termination rather than as the original cause of the conflict.
8
Perfect ethnic homogeneity is not necessary for peace (and is very rarely achieved in practice) after ethnic
war. Stay-behind minorities are not a problem as long as they are politically and militarily weak enough not
to represent a threat to the majority (Kaufmann, ‘‘Living Together after Ethnic Killing’’, 280).
9
Kaufmann, ‘‘Possible and Impossible Solutions’’, 160.
106
C. Pischedda
characteristics of partition – physical separation into ethnically homogeneous,
militarily defensible regions under autonomous rule, although not independent
from central political authority. Kaufmann draws straightforward policy recommendations from his analysis: the international community should abandon promotion of power-sharing agreements to resolve violent ethnic conflicts; instead it
should encourage and assist population exchanges to achieve ethnic ‘‘unmixing’’,
and promote the redrawing of interstate borders where necessary.10
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Critiques of the partition argument
Partition theory has been criticised for three main reasons. First, partition, where
it is adopted, does not reduce ethnic tensions but, rather, causes further violence,
displacement problems and war. Second, even if partition does work at times, there
is no systematic evidence that it outperforms alternative strategies of war termination. Third, it sets a bad precedent and risks provoking an interminable sequence of
wars of secession, potentially undermining the stability of the international system.
These counter-arguments and relevant empirical evidence are examined below.11
Partition equals more violence?
A common criticism of partition is that it inflicts tremendous suffering on the
affected populations during its implementation, while it does not necessarily lead
to long-term peace within and between the newly created political entities. In the
words of Radha Kumar, a leading ‘‘anti-partitionist’’, ‘‘[a]lthough described as the
lesser of two evils, the partitions in Cyprus, India, Palestine, and Ireland, rather
than separating irreconcilable ethnic groups, fomented further violence and forced
mass migration’’.12 The partition of British India was accompanied by violence
that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and created more than ten
million refugees; the war for Palestine in 1948 killed 16,000 and displaced
10
It should be noted that partition theory does not say anything about the viability of multi-ethnic states in
general. Its focus is more narrowly on the obstacles to conflict de-escalation and the difficulties in rebuilding multi-ethnic societies after large-scale communal violence.
11
Two other critical arguments not addressed in this article – that partition produces small, economically
unviable states and that it has a negative impact on the level of democracy of the newly created political
entities (see, for example, Etzioni, ‘‘The Evils of Self-Determination’’) – are not based on solid evidence.
The small scale of the domestic market is not an insurmountable obstacle to economic development as long
as the possibility of integration with international markets exists; in addition, civil peace is a crucial
precondition for prosperity, thus the central question remains whether partition is relatively effective in
putting an end to violence. In fact, clear-cut cases of countries that failed economically because of their
small size are hard to come by, while examples of small successful economies abound (Belgium, Switzerland
and Singapore, to mention just a few). On the issue of political development, Sambanis (‘‘Partition as a
Solution to Ethnic War’’, 459–64) found a positive and statistically significant relationship between
partition and prospects for postwar democratisation (see also Chapman and Roeder, ‘‘Partition as a
Solution to Wars of Nationalism’’, 684–5).
12
Kumar, ‘‘The Troubled History of Partition’’, 24–5. See also Fraser (Partition in Ireland, India and
Palestine), who argues that partition failed to solve the conflicts he studied.
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Partition as a Solution to Ethnic Conflict
107
about 750,000 Palestinians. Northern Ireland was plagued by civil violence from
1971 to 1998, while the de facto partition of Cyprus has not eliminated tensions
between the Greek and Turkish communities on the island – UN peacekeepers and
mainland Turkish forces are still present.
Moreover, in some cases partition appears to have simply transformed civil wars
into international ones. India and Pakistan remain locked in a rivalry that has
escalated into war four times since 1947 and contributed to their decisions to
develop nuclear weapons; Israel and its Arab neighbours have fought several
wars; and in 1998 Ethiopia and Eritrea clashed five years after their formal
separation.
The problem with this line of criticism is that it tends to attribute negative
consequences to partition that largely derive instead from the dynamics of ethnic
conflict and specific instances of poor implementation of partition.
That population transfers entail enormous human costs is undeniable; they
require people to abandon their ancestral homes, and moving populations are
vulnerable to both criminal and political violence. But ethnic civil wars can by
themselves provoke large-scale population movements and displacements: for
example, the war in Bosnia caused the displacement of more than two million
people, the March 1999 Serb offensive in Kosovo displaced about 1.4 million (over
two-thirds of the region’s population), and at least 4.7 million Iraqis have left their
homes since 2003. In many cases, the relevant question is not whether population
movements are desirable, but whether planned population transfers with international support and protection are preferable to ethnic cleansing by extremist
militias.13
The large-scale violence that followed the partition of colonial India was caused
by the intense security dilemmas between its Muslim and Hindu communities at
the national level and between Sikhs and Muslims in Punjab following the removal
of the imperial power that had previously guaranteed inter-ethnic peace. So it was
independence that caused both the partition and the ensuing violence on the
subcontinent.14 However, poor planning made matters far worse: many lives
could have been saved had the Indian government refrained from sending
Muslim refugee trains through Punjab (the focal point of Muslim-Sikh violence
after partition) or made systematic efforts to protect, feed and shelter the refugees
in transit.15
13
As noted in the introduction, this article is informed by a consequentialist approach, which adopts the
net number of lives saved as the main criterion for assessing the morality of a strategy of conflict resolution.
For different normative perspectives, informed by the ‘‘just war’’ doctrine, see Coppieters and Sakwa,
Contextualising Secession, and Moore, National Self-Determination and Secession. See also O’Leary, Debating
Partition: Justifications and Critiques.
14
Kaufmann, ‘‘When All Else Fails’’, 132–41.
15
Ibid., 140.
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108
C. Pischedda
Similarly, the partition of Palestine was not the fundamental cause of the 1948
Arab-Israeli conflict: the British did not intend to stay to keep the peace and the
Jewish and Arab communities could not agree on a bi-national solution; thus the
conflict was probably inevitable. However, the way partition was implemented
exacerbated the violence. The partition plan did not provide for any unmixing
of the populations (the Jewish state would contain 350,000 Arabs, 40 percent of its
population), and the borders were drawn without any consideration for military
defensibility.16
The importance of careful planning is further illustrated by the population
exchanges between Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey in the 1920s: with the deployment
of effective relief services by the League of Nations after 1925, the exchange of one
million people was conducted with very limited loss of life, while earlier less
organised transfers caused far more deaths.17
Several instances of re-ignition of ethnic violence after partition can also be
attributed to failure to plan for and properly implement ethnic unmixing.
Northern Ireland, where Catholics and Protestants live intermingled, experienced
intense ethnic antagonism and civil war, while the Republic of Ireland, almost
entirely Catholic, has been much more peaceful. Kashmir – the one territory
where Hindu and Muslim communities were not separated at the time of the
Indian partition – has been mired in a communal war since 1989. Analogously,
the intensification of Israeli-Palestinian violence during the first and the second
intifada can be explained, at least in part, by the higher levels of intermingling due
to expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.18
A critical look at the instances in which partition appears merely to have
transformed communal violence into international war also suggests that the
anti-partitionist position is overstated. Arguably, the very existence of any Jewish
state in the Middle East, not the particular one created through violent partition,
has been the fundamental cause of the Arab-Israeli wars. Three of the four postpartition wars between India and Pakistan were fought over ethnically mixed
Kashmir and can therefore be interpreted as a consequence of a ‘‘bad’’ partition,
rather than of partition in itself.19
By contrast, the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia occurred in spite of very low
levels of intermingling and is thus a clear-cut case of the failure of partition to
prevent the onset of international war. At the same time, this case illustrates a point
16
Downes, ‘‘The Holy Land Divided’’, 105–6.
Kaufmann, ‘‘Possible and Impossible Solutions’’, 171.
18
Downes, ‘‘The Holy Land Divided’’, 107–11. In addition, Downes argues that the lack of a Palestinian
state is a major reason for continued violence between Israel and the Palestinians.
19
The 1971 Indo-Pakistani war was caused by the armed secession of Bengali speaking East Pakistan (now
Bangladesh) from Urdu-speaking West Pakistan. This additional case of partition cannot easily be attributed to the 1947 partition, but was rather due to ethnic tensions between West Pakistanis and Bengalis and
to the fact that West Pakistanis dominated state institutions (Kaufmann, ‘‘When All Else Fails’’, 143). Since
partition, the relations between Pakistan and Bangladesh have been relatively peaceful.
17
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Partition as a Solution to Ethnic Conflict
109
dear to partition advocates: it is often easier to put a permanent end to international wars since the belligerents are not required to share a state and trust each
other after the violence ends. Moreover, after partition, the dynamics of the conflict
switch from mutual pre-emptive ethnic cleansing to conventional deterrence,
which tends to be less volatile and less dangerous for civilians.20 In this specific
case, the civil war in Ethiopia between the government and Eritrean rebels lasted
for 29 years causing nearly 200,000 battle-related deaths, while the international
war between Eritrea and Ethiopia lasted for less than three years and provoked
50,000 battle-related deaths.21
The sceptical view of the effectiveness of partition is apparently supported by
a statistical study conducted by Nicholas Sambanis. Analysing 145 cases of both
ethnic and ideological civil war in the post-1945 period, he found partition to be
positively associated – albeit not at conventional levels of statistical significance –
with war recurrence. This means that, other things being equal, a conflict characterised by partition is more likely to rekindle than one in which partition does
not occur.22
This study suffers, however, from a logical flaw much like the one found in some
of the critiques of partition discussed above. Sambanis defined partition as a war
outcome that entails border adjustments and demographic changes, without considering whether ethnic unmixing occurred. Carter Johnson suggested correcting
Sambanis’ approach by constructing a variable measuring the degree of ethnic
unmixing occurring as a consequence of partition.23 Using Sambanis’ dataset, he
found that in none of the six cases in which the opposing ethnic groups were
separated almost completely did the conflict recur within five years, while in five
20
Kaufmann, ‘‘Possible and Impossible Solutions’’, 150. In this situation, defensible borders and a balance
of power between the parties in conflict are crucial for stability in that they increase the costs of aggression
and reduce the probability of its success. The possibility of a resolute response from the international
community to a clear-cut case of international aggression would further lower incentives for both sides to
go on the offensive.
21
Lacina and Gleditsch, ‘‘Monitoring Trends in Global Combat’’. Fearon and Laitin (‘‘Ethnicity,
Insurgency and Civil War’’, 75) point out that, in the 1945–99 period, there were 25 inter-state wars,
with an average duration of less than three months; by contrast, in the same period, there were 125 civil
wars, with an average duration of about six years.
22
Sambanis, ‘‘Partition as a Solution to Ethnic War’’, 466–70.
23
Johnson, ‘‘Partitioning to Peace’’. His construction of a Post-partition Ethnic Homogeneity Index
(PEHI) assumes the partition of a war-affected country between two ethnic groups. Each of the two
newly-created entities has a minority. The index is thus calculated:
PEHI ¼
½OSM ðRSM þ NSMÞ
100
OSM
where OSM (Original State Minority) is the size of the minority in the original country (expressed as a
percentage of its total population), RSM (Rump State Minority) is the size of the original minority left in
the rump state after partition (as a percentage of its population), and NSM (New State Minority) is the size
of the fraction of the original majority that stayed as a minority in the new state (again as a percentage of its
population). The maximum possible value for PEHI is 100 (complete separation). This value decreases as
the stay-behind minorities grow with respect to the original minority.
110
C. Pischedda
of the 11 (45 percent) cases in which populations were still substantially intermingled, peace lasted for less than five years.24
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Partition vs. power-sharing
Thus, if well planned and implemented, partition can bring about lasting peace.
Criticising partition simply because war sometimes flares up again in its aftermath
misses the point that partition is not meant to guarantee peace, but rather to reduce
the risk of continued war. It does so by removing two key obstacles to the
de-escalation of violence: the need for high levels of cooperation between formerly
opposing belligerents and fears for group survival. Thus the crucial question is how
well partition performs relative to other strategies of ethnic war termination. Given
the very substantial human costs that large population transfers entail (even under
the best of circumstances), if solutions at least as effective and less draconian exist,
it may make no sense to even consider partition.
The alternatives to partition can essentially fall into the categories of military
victory or power-sharing agreements.25 Military victory is a relatively effective way
to end ethnic civil wars,26 but it often entails very serious costs. Achieving a
military victory requires either letting the conflict ‘‘run its course’’ with no external
involvement or intervening to tilt the balance in favour of one side. Both policies
may be hard political sells in the era of the ‘‘responsibility to protect’’ because they
24
Johnson, ‘‘Partitioning to Peace’’, 160–1. In cases of almost complete separation, Johnson’s index takes
on a value of at least 95 out of 100, but the picture remains substantially unaltered if a lower separation
threshold (PEHI>70) is adopted to distinguish between ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ partitions (0 percent and 56
percent of war recurrence after five years, respectively). Kaufmann (‘‘Living Together after Ethnic Killing’’,
285) noted that the PEHI is not an ideal measure of the ‘‘quality’’ of partition, because it simply captures
the reduction in size of rump minorities. A better indicator of the post-partition intensity of the security
dilemma would be the size of the left-behind minority relative to the total population of the rump state.
However, in practice using this alternative measure makes a difference in only one case – the 1994–96
conflict in Chechnya, where the Russian community represented only 2.5 percent of the total population
after 1996, but which receives a negative PEHI score because the minority share before the conflict was
even lower. This conflict recurred within five years in spite of the very low level of residual intermingling,
which speaks against partition theory.
25
Some databases consider an additional typology of war outcome, cease-fires or stalemates; often, cases of
de facto partition are coded this way. Moreover, some databases distinguish between negotiated settlements
and power-sharing agreements, the latter being a particular case of the former, in which belligerents
explicitly agree on a formula to share power. Negotiated settlements that entail regional autonomy or
federalism are not considered instances of partition here, consistently with the logic of Kaufmann’s argument, unless they entail the creation of autonomous regional security forces.
26
Kaufmann (‘‘Living Together after Ethnic Killing’’) finds that 43 percent (17 of 40) of post-Second
World War ethnic wars ending in military victories recurred; Licklider (‘‘The Consequences of Negotiated
Settlements in Civil War’’) codes 21 percent of identity civil wars concluded with a military victory as
recurring; and Toft (‘‘Peace through Security’’) finds that 12 percent (10 of 81) of civil wars (both ethnic
and ideological) ending in military victories started again. After controlling for other determinants of civil
war recurrence, Toft (‘‘Peace through Security’’) and Fortna (‘‘Does Peacekeeping Keep Peace?’’) find a
positive relationship between the occurrence of military victory and lasting peace. These results stand in
contrast to Doyle and Sambanis’ (Making War and Building Peace) findings (they code 28 cases of war
recurrence out of 47 military victories in ethnic wars, a failure rate of 60 percent).
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Partition as a Solution to Ethnic Conflict
111
may involve more casualties (inevitably including civilians) in the short run in
exchange for stability in the long run.27 In any case, a clear trend away from
military victory toward negotiated settlement of civil wars has emerged since the
early 1990s.28 Consequently, in many cases, international policymakers will be
faced with choosing between supporting partition or promoting power-sharing.
As noted earlier, Kaufmann is sceptical of the viability of power-sharing
agreements to the point of claiming that they are impossible solutions to ethnic
conflict.29 However, several studies have identified instances of successful powersharing. Alan Kuperman pointed out six cases in which a power-sharing agreement
following an ethnic war ushered in over ten years of peace (Lebanon-1958, Sudan1972, Zimbabwe-1979, Mozambique-1992, South Africa-1994 and Guatemala1996). None of these cases can be interpreted as a disguised military victory (all the
parties in conflict made substantial concessions and none of them was about to be
defeated on the battlefield) or as an instance of third-party peace-enforcement
(there was either no external enforcement or the intervention was short-lived and
the peace continued for over ten years after the departure of foreign troops).30
However, the fact that power-sharing can work does not mean it is likely to do
so. A glance at the number of cases settled with partition and with power-sharing
and their respective rates of success suggests that partition has been somewhat more
effective. Eleven ethnic wars which have ended with partition since 1945 have not
recurred, while power-sharing deals have brought about stable peace after seven
ethnic conflicts (Table 1, next page).31 Partition outperforms power-sharing more
substantially if one looks at their success rates: partition could not prevent war
recurrence in 35 percent of cases (six out of 17) in which it was attempted
(India-1947, Palestine-1948, Kashmir-1948, Cyprus-1964, Ethiopia-1993,
Chechnya-199632), while ethnic power-sharing failed in from 40 to 56 percent
27
In some cases, given the existence of constraints on the interveners’ level of military commitment,
support for the stronger side in the civil war may be the only sensible form of external involvement, but
this course of action may be especially unpalatable because it often entails siding with the actor responsible
for most of the humanitarian law violations. See Betts, ‘‘The Delusion of Impartial Intervention’’.
28
Toft, ‘‘Peace through Security’’.
29
Kaufmann, ‘‘Possible and Impossible Solutions’’. Subsequently, Kaufmann (‘‘Living Together after
Ethnic Killing’’) acknowledged five cases of successful power-sharing (three of which he codes as later
overturned by the majority), while still maintaining that this strategy is very likely to fail.
30
Kuperman, ‘‘Is Partition Really the Only Hope?’’.
31
Alternatively, we could use a definition of success as peace lasting for a certain period of time, for
example five years. In this way, we should consider as successful the 1949 de facto partition of Kashmir
(the conflict re-ignited in 1965), while, on the power-sharing side, the 1958 agreement in Lebanon (in
force until 1975) and the 1972 settlement in Sudan should be included.
32
The August 2008 clashes between Russian and South Ossetian forces, on the one hand, and the Georgian
military, on the other, are not considered episodes of recurrent war because, according to the limited
information available at the time of writing, the death toll did not reach the conventional threshold used to
define war (1000 battle-related deaths). See T. Bahrampour, ‘‘An Uncertain Death Toll in Georgia-Russia
War’’, Washington Post, 25 August 2008, A01. Even if this conflict is coded as a war, partition still
outperforms power-sharing, albeit by a smaller margin (ten wars successfully ended with partition and a
corresponding 41 percent recurrence rate).
71/71
74
91
91/92
92/93
92/93
92/94
91/95
92/95
75/99
98/99
72/79
75/89
77/92
84/94
80/96
Power-sharingh
Zimbabwe
Lebanon
Mozambique
South Africa
Guatemala
Start & end year
jure partition
facto partition
facto partition
facto partition
facto partition
facto partition
facto partition
jure partition
facto partition
jure partition
facto partition
Power-sharing
Power-sharing
Power-sharing
Power-sharing
Power-sharing
De
De
De
De
De
De
De
De
De
De
De
Settlement
0.3
<0.01
n.a.
40.5
0.05
0.08
0.25
4.49
3.2
n.a.
6
Residual
interminglingb
7,596
144,000
109,749
4,664
26,850
50,000
5,800
10,000
1,000g
1,200g
2,500
19,200
1,900
40,413
33,525
4,500
Battle-related
deaths
Successful post-WW II partitions and power-sharing (no war recurrence)
Partitiond
Pakistan (Bangladesh)
Cyprus
Iraq (Kurdistan)
Moldova (Transdniestria)
Georgia (South Ossetia)
Georgia (Abkhazia)
Azerbaijan (Nagorno-Karabakh)
Croatia
Bosnia
Timor Leste
Serbia (Kosovo)
Conflicta
Table 1.
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0
8
0
0
0
0
72e
0f
17
7
12
0
0
19
10
20
External enforcement
(troops per 1000 population)c
112
C. Pischedda
92/97
71/98
Power-sharing
Power-sharing
41,300
3,148
7
9
n.a. ¼ not available.
Notes: aEthnic wars that have not been over for at least five years – the standard timeframe in the literature to distinguish between a pause in fighting and the end of a
war – are excluded (e.g., the North-South Sudanese war concluded with the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement).
b
The residual level of intermingling after partition is measured as the size of the largest minority in the two rump states (as a percentage of the state’s total
population).
c
It refers to the initial level of enforcement, which tends to be the highest, in the aftermath of war. The level of enforcement is coded as zero when external forces were
withdrawn within a few months after the end of violence (i.e., in the cases of Pakistan, Zimbabwe and Iraq).
d
Three cases of partition reported in Kaufmann’s database are not included in this list. The partition of Algeria from France is excluded because it is a colonial case
and there is no agreement in the literature as to whether wars of decolonization should be considered as analytically comparable to ethnic civil wars. The 1991
secession of Somaliland from Somalia is not included because it is not clear how it should be coded: Somaliland did not experience significant violence after the
secession so this could be considered a case of successful partition; by contrast, the rest of the country remains mired in war, but it is not clear why one should expect
the separation of one of the warring parties in Somaliland to prevent those remaining in rump Somalia from continuing their fight. The secession of Slovenia from
Yugoslavia is excluded because of the extremely low level of deaths caused by the clashes between Slovenian and Yugoslav forces (reflected in the fact that the conflict
is not usually reported in civil war datasets). Instances of concession of regional autonomy after ethnic war that do not entail the creation of regional defence
capabilities, including autonomous security forces, are not considered cases of partition.
e
This figure includes both UN peacekeepers and mainland Turkish forces deployed in Northern Cyprus.
f
Operation Provide Comfort had a substantial ground force component, which withdrew after a few months. The only stable military presence on the ground were
about 300 UN observers; the international community continued to provide deterrence against Iraqi aggression against the Kurdish population through air-power
only.
g
This figure comes from Doyle and Sambanis, Making War and Building Peace, because the source used for the other codings (Lacina and Gleditsch, ‘‘Monitoring
Trends in Global Combat’’) reports a death toll just below 1000, the standard threshold of violence for the definition of civil war, while the majority of civil war
datasets consulted lists this conflict.
h
Several cases of apparently successful power-sharing agreements (at the central or regional level) are excluded here because in reality most provisions of the
agreement were not implemented (for example, after the war between Bangladesh and the Chittagong Hill People) or because the conflict in question never reached
conventional levels of violence and is thus not reported in most civil war datasets (e.g., Nicaragua vs. Miskitos and Spain vs. Basque separatists).
Sources: Johnson, ‘‘Partitioning for Peace’’ (intermingling); Lacina and Gleditsch ‘‘Monitoring Trends in Global Combat’’ (battle-related deaths); The Military
Balance, various years, and Dobbins et al., The UN’s Role in Nation-Building (external enforcement).
Tajikistan
UK (N. Ireland)
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Partition as a Solution to Ethnic Conflict
113
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114
C. Pischedda
of cases, depending on the database used.33 In line with the theory, in almost all
successful cases of partition, the residual level of ethnic mixing was extremely low,
while this was not so in the cases of post-partition war recurrence.34
It is important to note that in many of the cases of successful partition and
power-sharing reported in Table 1, external actors deployed military contingents
to keep or even impose the peace. Here, third-party enforcement is not considered a distinct typology of ethnic war termination because the presence of
international forces has become very common and because it is impossible,
with the methodology adopted, to discriminate between cases in which
intervention may have been the key cause of peace and those in which the
institutional dimension of the settlement (that is, partition or power-sharing)
may have played a more crucial role. In addition, proponents of partition
and power-sharing do not see these solutions as incompatible with third-party
security guarantees.
Nevertheless, a comparative assessment of partition and power-sharing needs to
take into account to what extent the two strategies rely on third-party military
presence. High levels of external enforcement raise questions about whether the
peace will be self-sustaining once the peacekeepers depart and whether long-term
deployments of robust international forces are feasible, given existing constraints
on international resources. In this light, as Table 1 indicates, successful powersharing deals have the merit of relying less on external enforcement, as measured by
the number of international troops per thousand of local population.35
In sum, the historical record provides a relatively positive picture of partition
vis-à-vis power-sharing: there are more instances of successful partition on which
to base future policy.36 At the same time, the fact that the successful cases of powersharing required less external enforcement suggests that it is premature to write off
33
Toft (‘‘Peace through Security’’) lists seven ethnic conflicts out of 16 (44 percent) that ended with
a negotiated settlement since the end of the Second World War as recurring. Kaufmann (‘‘Living
Together after Ethnic Killing’’) points out that half of the ethnic wars that terminated with power-sharing
resumed. Hartzell and Hoddie (‘‘Institutionalizing Peace’’) code ten out of 19 (53 percent) ethnic conflicts
that ended with power-sharing as recurring, while according to Doyle and Sambanis (Making War and
Building Peace) five out of nine (56 percent) ethnic wars terminated with a negotiated settlement started
again. (Cases of partitions that Toft, Hartzell and Hoddie, and Doyle and Sambanis code as negotiated
settlements were excluded from these calculations.)
34
In eight of the nine cases of successful partition for which data is available, the largest stay-behind
minority represented less than 10 percent of the total population of the rump state (see Table 1).
Conversely, in four of the six cases of war recurrence, the largest minority represented over 10 percent
of the total population (the level of intermingling for the unsuccessful cases is not reported; see Johnson,
‘‘Partitioning to Peace’’, 158).
35
The classical reference for a methodology for calculating troop requirements for peace-enforcement
operations is Quinlivan, ‘‘Force Requirements for Stability Operations’’.
36
The simple methodology adopted here does not make it possible to check for the impact of other factors
that may affect the risk of war recurrence, thus the possibility cannot be ruled out that the observed
correlation between partition and post-war peace is spurious. In addition, there could be a selection bias
in the data due to the fact that the international community is likely to consider partition when groups are
not highly intermixed, but these cases are also likely to be easier to settle according to partition theory.
Partition as a Solution to Ethnic Conflict
115
this strategy of conflict resolution. In fact, on the one hand, higher levels of external
enforcement have the potential of improving the chances of success of powersharing in the future; on the other hand, it may be difficult to build the political
will for deployment of the robust international forces that the historical record
suggests could be necessary for partition to work.
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Contagious rebellions
Perhaps the strongest objection to partition is that it risks setting a bad precedent,
creating incentives for more separatist wars and making ongoing conflicts more
intractable. International interventions aimed at partitioning countries affected by
ethnic war would teach disgruntled minorities around the world that resorting to
violence to obtain statehood pays off.37 In a worst-case scenario, these perverse
incentives could unleash a domino sequence of ethnic rebellions, thus potentially
destabilising the international system. Some form of contagion could happen even
without a radical change in international norms (that is, establishing that the
principle of self-determination of minorities takes precedence over the preservation
of state territorial integrity). Contagion could occur simply as a consequence of an
ad hoc policy of support for partition, as long as the criterion for intervention is the
passing of a certain threshold of violence.38
Partition advocates respond to this objection by asserting that contagion dynamics
tend to play a very small role, if any, in the decision to rebel. Kaufmann argues that,
as secession is very costly, only groups that see no viable alternative to rebellion head
down this dangerous path.39 A variation on the theme is the argument that acknowledges the possible contagion effects of partition but holds that this is likely to be only
marginal, and that domestic factors are far more important in decisions to launch
a rebellion than the international environment. The limited influence of contagion,
according to Alexander Downes, is due to the fact that precedents are rarely established in international relations ‘‘because they require common interpretations by
many actors from a variety of viewpoints, followers who abide by the resulting
convention, and a lack of ambiguity regarding whether the relevant convention
applies to a given situation’’.40 Finally, Kaufmann argues that even if partition
37
This form of diffusion of civil war is often referred to as ‘‘contagion’’, ‘‘domino effect’’ or ‘‘demonstration effect’’. It is intended as the spread of armed violence ‘‘through the lessons drawn by actors outside
the original conflict’’ and it should be considered as analytically distinct from other forms of conflict
diffusion, such as spillover effects associated with refugee and small-arm flows (Ayres and Saideman, ‘‘Is
Separatism as Contagious’’, 94).
38
Fearon (‘‘Separatist Wars, Partition, and World Order’’) notices that this incentive problem is not
limited to existing minorities dissatisfied with the status quo. Ambitious political entrepreneurs will be
tempted to ‘‘activate’’ ethnic cleavages that previously were not salient so as to have a plausible claim of
statehood (and associated benefits); launching an armed insurgency with the objective of provoking state
retaliation may be an effective way to do just that.
39
Kaufmann, ‘‘Living Together after Ethnic Killing’’, 288.
40
Downes, ‘‘The Holy Land Divided’’, 87.
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116
C. Pischedda
theory were to dominate international thinking on how to respond to ethnic
civil war, secessionist rebels would rarely receive active international support,
mostly because of the aversion of public opinion in the first world to military
entanglements abroad, and that rebel decision-makers are well aware of this fact.
Yet, these counter-arguments are not compelling. Even if one accepts that clear
international precedents cannot be established, it does not necessarily follow that
certain behaviour patterns in the international system cannot be detected. Thus for
contagion to occur, ethnic rebels do not have to be certain of forthcoming international support but simply have to perceive an increase in the probability of this
happening as a result of previous cases of internationally-sanctioned partition.
Ultimately, clarifying how prevalent and important contagion dynamics are is an
empirical issue. Ayres and Saideman provide some support for the contagion argument with their finding that successful secessionist attempts are associated with a
higher probability that an ethnic group in the same region will be separatist.41 The
most solid empirical evidence, however, of how the prospect of third-party intervention, rather than simple observation of rebellion outcome, affects the risk of
ethnic war comes from case studies of the recent wars in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Kuperman finds that the emerging norm of the responsibility to protect, ‘‘by raising
expectations of diplomatic and military intervention to protect groups targeted
by . . . [government] retaliation, creates moral hazard that unintentionally fosters
rebellion by lowering its expected cost and increasing its likelihood of success’’.42
In 1992, Bosnia’s Muslim leaders decided to secede from Yugoslavia, with full
awareness of the high risk of massive Serb retaliation and of the virtual impossibility of prevailing against military superior forces because they expected international intervention on their behalf.43 Similarly, in 1998–99, the Kosovo Liberation
Army (KLA) launched a hit-and-run campaign against government forces and
installations in the region with the deliberate intention of provoking Serb retaliation against the Albanian population so as to attract international military intervention in support of their cause.44 It remains to be seen whether these two cases
illustrate a relatively common pattern, but the generalisability of this mechanism
cannot be ruled out, as Kaufmann seems to do, by asserting that Western publics
41
Ayres and Saideman, ‘‘Is Separatism as Contagious’’, 101–8. However, the magnitude of the effect is
substantially smaller than those associated with domestic determinants of separatism. In addition, the study
is affected by problems of endogeneity, which do not make it possible to assess whether the observed
correlation really supports the existence of a contagion effect or may instead indicate that unobserved
factors cause both successful secessionism and subsequent secessionist tendencies in the region.
42
Kuperman, ‘‘The Moral Hazard of Humanitarian Intervention’’, 51.
43
Ibid., 56–64.
44
Ibid., 64–71. In principle, the prospect of external intervention in support of a victimised minority
could reduce the risk of war by deterring government retaliations against provocations by the rebels. But
this did not happen in the two cases studied by Kuperman. In Kosovo, threats of NATO bombing did
persuade Milosevic to agree on a cease-fire with the KLA and not to exploit his military advantage, but they
were not sufficient to make him acquiesce in the rebels’ violation of the cease-fire and reoccupation of
previously abandoned territory.
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Partition as a Solution to Ethnic Conflict
117
are anti-interventionist. This claim is belied by the activism of the international
community, which has conducted forceful humanitarian interventions in 20 countries since 1990.45 The fact that there will never be the material resources and
political will to intervene in each and every case of ethnic war does not mean that
ethnic minorities will see intervention as an implausible prospect and will not try to
increase their chance of receiving external help by emulating previous successful
attempts.
Thus, the uncomfortable bottom line is that partition may be an effective conflict management strategy, but risks generating incentives for new separatist rebellions. Policymakers deciding whether to intervene in support of partition in a
specific case will have to weigh the probability of putting an end to the war and
the importance they attribute to this outcome (which may be a function of humanitarian concerns, fears that continuation of the conflict will destabilise neighbouring countries through refugee flows, and national security considerations) against
the specific risks of contagion, in particular at the regional level.46
De facto or de jure partition?
Whether partition is de facto or de jure may have an impact on the risk of contagion. Formal recognition of statehood is extremely valuable for ethnic groups
controlling a certain territory because it gives access to balance-of-payments
finance, development assistance, potentially more military support, and a set of
rights and privileges under international law and practice. Thus an external intervention in support of de jure partition should be expected to have a stronger
contagion effect than one aimed at creating a loose federation or de facto partitioning of a country. This reasoning underlies recent proposals for partition in Iraq,
which envisage the creation of three loosely federated ethnically homogeneous
regions with autonomous security forces, rather than de jure partition. It is thought
that such an institutional arrangement would reduce the risk of Turkish military
intervention, given that Turkey would be especially wary of the demonstrative
effect on its own Kurdish population of an independent Kurdistan.47
On the other hand, the two types of partition could differ in terms of their
effectiveness in terminating conflicts. At first, Kaufmann emphasized physical
45
Afghanistan, Albania, Bosnia, Burundi, Central African Republic, Croatia, Democratic Republic of
Congo, East Timor, Georgia, Haiti, Iraq (Kurdistan-1991), Ivory Coast, Kosovo, Liberia, Macedonia,
Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan (Darfur) and Tajikistan (ibid., 52). This list does not include
consent-based peace-keeping and monitoring missions as well as other forms of intervention that do not
entail troop deployments, such as economic sanctions and diplomatic pressures.
46
Demonstration effects are likely to be especially strong within the same region because ethnic groups are
more likely to see as relevant the experiences of groups that are similar to them and that operate in a similar
environment, while at the same time information on groups in the region is more easily accessible.
47
See for example, Kaufmann, ‘‘Living Together after Ethnic Killing’’, and Joseph and O’Hanlon, The Case
for Soft Partition in Iraq.
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C. Pischedda
separation as the crucial element, asserting that ‘‘[s]overeignty is secondary: defensible ethnic enclaves reduce violence with or without independent sovereignty, while
partition without separation does nothing to stop mass killing’’.48 Subsequently,
Kaufmann came to accept Downes’ view that a combination of demographic separation and sovereignty is a more effective solution to communal conflict, because it
minimises the instances in which former enemies need to cooperate and trust each
other, and it does not require them to disarm or merge their military forces.49 A state
in which former enemies have to share sovereignty over the same territory is likely to
be dysfunctional because its institutions will be paralysed by mutual distrust and the
political discourse will be dominated by ethnic parties and extremists. Moreover,
both sides will be reluctant to disarm for fear of being vulnerable in case the enemy
cheats; third-party intervention may not be sufficient to overcome these fears because
the local actors know that the international presence is only temporary. In addition,
formal admission to the club of states comes with the important advantage that
it is more likely that there will be international support against possible revanchist
aggression.50 Without de jure partition, opportunities for conflict will abound.
These arguments are not entirely convincing. Certainly, ethnic tensions in de
facto partitioned countries can impair the functioning of state-wide institutions,
as the case of Bosnia illustrates. In reality, however, the difficulties associated with
demobilisation and integration of the ethnic armed forces are not necessarily so
daunting because ethnic groups do not need to disarm, regardless of the legal status
of the newly created political entities. Downes’ observation that if ethnic groups are
allowed to keep separate security forces, then more than one state exists, given that
monopoly over means of coercion is a necessary attribute of the state, is tautological
and purely definitional. Brought to its logical conclusion, this assertion implies that
there is no such as thing as de facto partition and that, for example, the Republika
Srpska (the Serb entity in Bosnia) and Nagorno Karabakh (Azerbaijan’s ethnically
Armenian break-away region) are states because they have control over local security forces (limited to the police in Bosnia).
Another argument in favour of de jure partition is that several studies have found
a positive correlation between regional ethnic group concentration and the risk of
48
Kaufmann, ‘‘Possible and Impossible Solutions’’, 137.
Kaufmann, ‘‘Living Together after Ethnic Killing’’, 282.
50
Downes, ‘‘The Holy Land Divided’’. It would be possible to make a further distinction within the
category of de facto partition between cases in which the post-partition political entities are enshrined in
the state’s constitution (as in Bosnia) and cases in which partition is simply the product of a cease-fire
between the belligerents and there is no agreement on sovereignty (as in Georgia and Azerbaijan, for
example). The two typologies could be characterised by different risks of war re-ignition because a partition
following a cease-fire may come closer to a de jure partition, in that it minimises the need for cooperation
between opposing ethnic groups. This distinction is not elaborated in this article because Bosnia is the only
instance of constitutionally-sanctioned de facto partition. Other cases of ethnic war that ended with the
concession of varying degrees of regional autonomy cannot qualify as partition because they did not entail
autonomous regional defence capabilities.
49
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Partition as a Solution to Ethnic Conflict
119
group rebellion.51 David Laitin’s theoretical explanation of this finding is that
group concentration increases the feasibility of mobilisation for insurgency,
making it easier for militants to control (ensuring cooperation and punishing
defection) the population in whose name the insurgency is being carried out.52
In this light, if undivided sovereignty accompanies ethnic unmixing, partition will
increase the risk of civil war by increasing group concentration. By contrast, this
dynamic would not apply in cases of de jure partition because the contending
groups each get their own state.
However, Laitin’s measure of group concentration is not a good proxy for
demographic separation as prescribed by partition theory. Rather, it captures the
concept of a regional base, where at least 25 percent of the minority group resides
and in which the minority represents the predominant share of the population. The
existence of such a regional base does not say anything about the settlement
patterns in the rest of the country, which could be highly intermixed and therefore
very sensitive to security dilemmas. Thus it is far from clear whether the correlation
between this measure of group concentration and civil war onset can be construed
as evidence of the superiority of de jure partition.
Deductive arguments aside, the empirical evidence does not support the notion
that de facto partition is less effective. Only three of the 11 successful partitions in
Table 1 were de jure partitions; in addition, two of the six cases of failed partition
mentioned above (India-1947 and Ethiopia-1993) were de jure partitions.53 Thus,
given the plausibility of a lower risk of contagion associated with de facto partition,
this option may often be preferable to formal partitioning of sovereignty.54
Conclusion
This review of the empirical evidence suggests that partition can be a viable strategy
of ethnic war termination and that the majority of cases of failure can be explained
in terms of incomplete demographic separation of the belligerents. Furthermore,
51
See, among others, Laitin, ‘‘Ethnic Unmixing and Civil War’’.
Ibid.
53
The partition of Palestine is considered here as de facto partition because it did not lead to the emergence
of two sovereign states but just one – Israel. In their recent statistical study, Chapman and Roeder
(‘‘Partition as a Solution to Wars of Nationalism’’) found evidence in support of the hypothesis that
de jure partition is more effective in terminating ethnic war. However, it is not clear how robust their
findings are given the unusual definition of success – a peace lasting at least two years. If, instead of this
temporal standard, one considers whether a conflict has ever recurred, the failure rate of de jure partition
becomes much higher (43 percent or 3 out of 7 cases, as opposed to 12 percent or 1 out of 7 cases with the
two year-peace standard).
54
This is not to deny that de facto partition may be a temporary solution, with the possible tendency to
evolve over time into de jure partition or recentralization of state authority (the recent recognition of the
independence of Kosovo by part of the international community and international efforts to reinforce
federal institutions in Bosnia are examples of these opposite patterns). However, as long as this tendency is
not associated with renewal of war it should not be counted as evidence against the conflict resolution
effectiveness of de facto partition.
52
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C. Pischedda
the historical record reveals more instances of lasting peace after partition than after
power-sharing.
This is not to say that partition should be the primary strategy of international
intervention during ethnic conflict, but simply that it deserves serious consideration and should not be excluded a priori. Nevertheless, the methodology adopted
here does not make it possible to check for the impact of several other factors likely
to affect the risk of war recurrence. Thus, the possibility that the observed relationship between partition and lasting peace is spurious cannot be ruled out.
Future studies will have to try to address this problem with statistical methodologies. As noted, there have been attempts in this direction, but the existing analyses
do not account for any measure of residual ethnic intermingling after partition and
thus fail to test partition theory properly. Efforts should also be devoted to developing a new index of ethnic intermingling, which would not simply measure the
size of rump minorities, but would also consider their territorial distribution within
the state. This would make it possible to test the core prediction of the security
dilemma theory, that is, that highly intermingled patterns of population geography
are the most dangerous.
At the same time, more research is needed to clarify under what circumstances
power-sharing deals are likely to hold. This would help policymakers managing
a specific conflict tackle the difficult task of figuring out whether it is still possible
to reconcile the parties or whether ethnic antagonisms have reached a point of no
return, making partition the only sensible course of action. In addition, interveners
have to give careful consideration to the possibility that supporting partition in a
certain case might encourage secessionist rebellions elsewhere. The risk of contagion implies that policymakers may face a tough trade-off between putting an end
to a specific conflict and preserving the stability of the wider region.
Finally, a key policy dilemma emerges from the observation that partition tends
to work only if ethnic groups are separated. If populations are intermingled but
promoting partition still seems the only viable strategy of intervention, the international community will have to assess whether the political will to promote ethnic
unmixing exists. Ethnic separation can be achieved through voluntary and peaceful
population exchanges between the contending groups, encouraged and supervised
by the international community or, more controversially, through support for a
local actor engaged in an effort to take over an ethnically mixed area (US support
for the Croatian offensive to recapture Krajina during the war in Bosnia, which
created 200,000 Serb refugees, exemplifies this approach). Critics would note
that this second strategy is tantamount to international support for a ‘‘soft’’ version
of ethnic cleansing. While true in a sense, this objection misses the point that
providing support could grant the intervener substantial leverage on the local
actor (in addition to the possibility of deploying an international protection
force), thus reducing the risk of egregious violations of human rights and
Partition as a Solution to Ethnic Conflict
121
humanitarian law. If none of these options is feasible, the only alternative strategy
for the international community in some cases may be – tragically – to wait for
ethnic violence to run its natural course of ethnic cleansing and killing to the point
where relatively homogeneous regions emerge and partition becomes a sensible
course of action.
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