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Ethnic violence broke out in the Soviet Union during the second half of Mikhail Gorbachev's time as Soviet leader. In general, Soviet leaders were taken by surprise by the upsurge in nationalism in the USSR. They came to believe that Communism had supplanted nationalism in the Soviet Union, but they were proven wrong. It is the thesis of this project that territoriality is the underlying factor behind the ethnic conflicts that broke out in the last years of the USSR and the first years of the post-Soviet era. It is a psychological program in the human mind that defines what are the "proper" boundaries of a polity. Since territoriality is a constant, there exist six identifiable facilitating factors that condition how territoriality leads to ethnic violence. These facilitating conditions are the size of an ethnicity (majority/minority status), economic resource differences, the availability of information, the presence of an ethnic diaspora nearby, the location of a polity, and the role of the elites. To address the issues surrounding the territorial basis of ethnic conflict, an exploratory, heuristic, most-similar systems comparative case study approach is employed. This project's temporal domain is 1988 to the present, and the polities selected for examination are Nagorno-Karabakh, Moldova, and Chechnya. In addition, two non-events are chosen for study: Tatarstan and Crimea. In the non-events, ethnic violence did not break out on a sustained and prolonged scale. Territoriality was present in all of the examined cases except for the second Chechen war (1999-), which mutated from an ethnic conflict into a religious struggle on the Chechen rebel side. The facilitating factors are present in some form in the five cases.
Ethnic Conflict, Ethnic Violence, Post Soviet Conflict, Soviet Union, USSR
Date of Defense
August 26, 2011.
Submitted Note
A Dissertation submitted to the Political Science Department in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Bibliography Note
Includes bibliographical references.
Advisory Committee
Heemin Kim, Professor Directing Dissertation; Jonathan Grant, University Representative; Dale Smith, Committee Member; Charles Barrilleaux, Committee Member; Lee Metcalf, Committee Member.
Publisher
Florida State University
Identifier
FSU_migr_etd-4900
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