Publisher's Synopsis
In recent years the threat of internal violence in many East European and Third World countries has greatly increased. During the Cold War, governments frequently owed their relatively tight control to support from one of the superpowers. With the decline of the Soviet Union such countries, particularly those with ethnically heterogeneous populations, have been much more susceptible to communal strife. As the Yugoslav experience shows, such conflicts have a tendency both to intensify and to lengthen due to the intractable nature of the conflict issue, thus increasing the likelihood of external actors being pulled into the ongoing violence. In this book leading experts in comparative and international politics examine this tendency of communal conflicts to spill over into the international arena. They also look at the conditions under which these processes do not occur or are mediated successfully. The authors combine theoretical perspectives with case studies, covering examples from the First World War to state-building in Iraq (and whether it was a precursor of the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf Crisis).
