Are Inter-Communal Conflicts Inevitable?

[Faeelin]

So I'm reading about India at the moment, and about the leadup to partition. As late as 1945, Jinnah and Nehru were on board with the idea of a federal state; but when Gandhi intervened to oppose it, the state exploded violently. Neighbors drowning neighbors, hacking up old men who sold fruit in the market, and in some parts of India thinks collapsed completely.

You see the same things time and time again; Czechoslovakia in 1938, Poland in 1919-1921, etc. Yet a few years before, even if things weren't perfect, the communities got along well enough.

So in areas where intercommunal violence has broken off, where they significantly worse than places where it hadn't, or is it just an association with a general breakdown of law and order? Put another way, could someone see American whites and blacks going at it in a general collapse of civil order? In the 1960s? Or does the breakout of intercommunal violence mean there wasn't a civil society to begin with, and that state is always on the knife edge?

[PDH]

Short answer: no, with a but; long answer: yes, with a maybe.

[Martinus]

I think it does not work well in societies built around a strong principle of solidarity, which includes most of the conservative societies, however it is less of a problem in more individualist/frontier-mentality societies - hence it works better in the US than, say, Poland.

[citizen k]

I thought communes were peaceful places. 

[Warspite]

They are not inevitable, but can be made much more likely by many factors. It also depends on how you define "conflict".

[Strix]

I believe that it depends on how the State was created and that any inevitable conflicts can be found in their origins.

If a State is an artificial one created by a 3rd party than conflicts are more likely to occur. This is seen a lot in those nations made by Colonial Powers and those states created by a treaty among outside powers e.g. new national borders being drawn up after a war. If it's more natural where participants in the State all decide at the beginning to be a part (or join later) I believe you see regional differences and conflicts but not of a fatal flaw variety.

[Drakken]

Absolutely. Conflict is part of the territory of being human (and thus animal).

Also, bear in mind that in localities political opponents, neighbors, even family members, routinely exploit conflict factions to settle scores with people they don't like or envy, denouncing them to the relevant authorities even though they are not guilty of anything, and even for things done as far as a few generations before just out of spite and revenge. Faction lines in small communities can literally be drawn over countless histories of interfamilial interactions that happened as far as a century ago, regardless of political affiliation. That explain why, in occupied France for example, people renowed for being rather left-wing or sympathetic to the Popular Front in the 30s would cooperate with the Nazi occupation force and denounce neighbors as collaborators with the Resistance, not out of political loyalty, but because their neighbors' son had slept with their daughter, or stole one of their cows, or their father had been beaten in a local election by the neighbors' father, etc.

Civil war violence is not a mere expression of madness and the chaotic nature of mankind unworthy of being studied because it is barbarious, but on the contrary it has a logic of its own, one resource that can be used to maintain cohesion, obedience, and and order (or on the contrary, disrupt and 'convince' population to switch their support). And of course, the whole sets of conflicts within a locality can merge inside this context of civil unrest and set in a vicious circle of violence and exaction even outside the control of the factions themselves.

[Drakken]

I highly recommend this book for studies of civil war and intracommunal violence:

http://www.amazon.com/Violence-Cambridge-Studies-Comparative-Politics/dp/0521670047

[swallow]

I believe that it depends on how the State was created and that any inevitable conflicts can be found in their origins.

If a State is an artificial one created by a 3rd party than conflicts are more likely to occur. This is seen a lot in those nations made by Colonial Powers and those states created by a treaty among outside powers e.g. new national borders being drawn up after a war. If it's more natural where participants in the State all decide at the beginning to be a part (or join later) I believe you see regional differences and conflicts but not of a fatal flaw variety.

My history is poor - do you think that the extremes mentioned don't happen where you haven't had ethnicities artificially mixed?

[Strix]

I believe that it depends on how the State was created and that any inevitable conflicts can be found in their origins.

If a State is an artificial one created by a 3rd party than conflicts are more likely to occur. This is seen a lot in those nations made by Colonial Powers and those states created by a treaty among outside powers e.g. new national borders being drawn up after a war. If it's more natural where participants in the State all decide at the beginning to be a part (or join later) I believe you see regional differences and conflicts but not of a fatal flaw variety.

My history is poor - do you think that the extremes mentioned don't happen where you haven't had ethnicities artificially mixed?

I didn't say that. I just said that inevitable conflicts are more likely to be found in nations that are more artificial in their origins than those where people made their own decision to become a state.

[The Brain]

What was inevitable was the OP's butchering of the English language.