| dc.description.abstract | This study is essentially a critique of how the three dominant paradigms of
explanatory international relations theory – (neo-)realism, liberalism, and
systemic constructivism – conceive of, analytically deal with, and explain ethnic
conflict and sovereignty. By deconstructing their approaches to ethnic identity
formation in general and ethnic conflict in particular it argues that all three
paradigms, in their epistemologies, ontologies and methodologies through
reification and by analytically equating ethnic groups with states, tend to
essentialise and substantialise the ethnic lines of division and strategic
essentialisms of ethnic and ethno-nationalist elites they set out to describe, and,
all too often, even write them into existence. Particular attention, both at the
theoretical and empirical level, will be given to the three explanatory frameworks
explanatory IR has contributed to the study of ethnic conflict: the ‘ethnic security
dilemma’, the ‘ethnic alliance model’, and, drawing on other disciplines,
instrumentalist approaches. The deconstruction of these three frameworks will
form the bulk of the theoretical section, and will subsequently be shown in the
case study to be ontologically untenable or at least to fail to adequately explain
the complex dynamics of ethnic identity formation in ethnic conflict.By making
these essentialist presumptions, motives, and practices explicit this study
makes a unique contribution not only to the immediate issues it addresses but
also to the wider debate on the nature of IR as a discipline. As a final point,
drawing on constitutive theory and by conceiving of the behaviour and motives
of protagonists of ethnic conflict as expressions of a fluid, open-ended, and
situational matrix of identities and interests without sequential hierarchies of
dependent and independent variables, the study attempts to offer an alternative,
constitutive reading of ethnic and nationalist identity to the discourses of
explanatory IR.
These themes that are further developed in the empirical section where,
explanatory IR’s narratives of ethnic group solidarity, ethno-nationalism, and
national self-determination are examined and deconstructed by way of the case
study of the relations between the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Iraqi
Kurdish ethno-nationalist parties in the wider context of the political status of the
autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq. With this ambition this study makes an
original empirical contribution by scrutinising these relations in a depth unique to
the literature. | en_GB |
