Slaughter Among Neighbors: The Political Origins of Communal Violence.

• Author: Auster, Amy

The Cold War ended and the battles of ancient ethnic hatreds began. At least that is how history might write the late twentieth century, if it were to rely on the picture painted by the journalists and editorial writers in the 1990s. Current newspapers are awash with editorials that sigh over the hopelessness of the Bosnian situation, headlines that scream tribal death in Rwanda, mind-numbing news analysis of the interminable Middle East "peace process." Politicians in the United States and elsewhere shake their heads, call the violence intractable and vote against sending soldiers off to what will surely become a guerrilla war. When neighbors want to kill each other, they say, there is virtually nothing that can be done.

And then the television pictures hit CNN. Bloodied bodies in marketplaces, bloated corpses floating in lakes, big bellies on children swarmed by flies, and all of a sudden politicians must do something. The American Congress tosses dollars from its hat, the United Nations Security Council passes resolutions, humanitarian aid is dropped from helicopters and small-time foreign despots are summoned to European capitals so that well-shod bureaucrats may express disapproval over their boorish behavior.

Yet, the conflicts remain unresolved. Instead, international efforts toward peacekeeping end up resembling the hopscotch squares kids chalk on sidewalks in pink and yellow. Hop over Kenya, land with two feet on Bosnia. Scoot one-footed around the West Bank and leap over Central Asia to land with the other foot on Lebanon. On the next pass, avoid Lebanon entirely and return via South Africa. The goal is to reach Sky Blue, the endzone of hopscotch, and return to Square One without a single misstep to win the game. In the real world, however, the international community almost never hops smoothly home. Inevitably a few ethnic groups contained in box three, or box five, or box one, will start to shoot at one another. The game begins anew.

Is this never-ending cycle really caused by those ancient ethnic hatreds so frequently held to blame, or other, more tangible forces? In today's post-Cold War world of newly independent and developing states, identifying the roofs of intra-state and communal violence has become a central issue for international security and multilateral policy. Yet, there remains a dearth of factual literature on the causes of this type of violence.

Finally, Human Rights Watch, one of the most prominent worldwide...