by Sonia Shah

About the author: Sonia Shah is an editor and publisher at South End Press in Boston.

From Yugoslavia to Northern Ireland, from Sri Lanka to Spain, and from the former Soviet Union to the Occupied Territories, people are raising the banner of ethnicity to cry foul to their neighbors. Even in countries where ethnic conflicts have not exploded into full-scale armed violence—in Canada, France, and the United States, for example—more and more people are uniting as ethnic groups and bringing their grievances into the political sphere.

Cultural Clashes

Ethnicity—the language, values, and histories shared by a group of people— has been evolving and generating itself for most, if not all, of the human age. Ancient history is full of ethnic conflicts, but industrialization, the age...