The wave of ethnic conflict that has recently swept across parts of Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Africa has led many political observers to fear that these conflicts are contagious. Initial outbreaks in such places as Bosnia, Chechnya, and Rwanda, if not contained, appear capable of setting off epidemics of catastrophic proportions. In this volume, David Lake and Donald Rothchild have organized an ambitious, sophisticated exploration of both the origins and spread of ethnic conflict, one that will be useful to policymakers and theorists alike.

The editors and contributors argue that ethnic conflict is not caused directly by intergroup differences or centuries-old feuds and that the collapse of the Soviet Union did not simply uncork ethnic passions long suppressed. They look instead at how anxieties over security, competition for resources, breakdown in communication with the government, and the inability to make enduring commitments lead ethnic groups into conflict, and they consider the strategic interactions that underlie ethnic conflict and its effective management.

On March 4 and 5, 1996, the Stanford Center for International Security and Arms Control, in conjunction with the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, convened a research planning conference on "Police Reform in States under Transition." The conference was unusual in that its primary purpose was to foster an ongoing discussion between academics working in the area of democratization and police reform, and policymakers running police reform programs in countries such as Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, South Africa, and EI Salvador. Our primary goal for the conference was to construct a research agenda that would allow continued dialogue between scholars and policymakers, and would focus on questions of theory and practice immediately applicable to policymakers in the field.

Participants in the conference included Robert Perito, Special Advisor to the Director of the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP), U.S. Department of Justice; Frederick Mecke, Director, Office of International Criminal Justice, U.S. Department of State; Arnstein Overkil, Police Major General of Asker and Baerum Police Headquarters in Norway, and advisor to the Palestinian Authority on policing; Diana Gordon, Chair of the Department of Political Science at City College of New York; Louise Shelley, professor in the Department of Justice, Law and Society at American University; William Stanley from the Department of Political Science at the University of New Mexico; Jeffrey Ian Ross, a fellow at the National Institute of Justice; and faculty and staff from Stanford University and the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict.

Western analysts have become increasingly alarmed with Russia's assertive foreign policy -- in both the economic and the political/strategic spheres -- toward the new states of the former Soviet Union. Many have cited Russia's military interventions in Georgia, Tajikistan, and Moldova as signals of Russia's new imperialist designs. Russian policy toward the Baltic states has also spurred alarm. While Russian troops pulled out of the Baltic states as planned, the Russian Foreign Ministry has nonetheless threatened economic sanctions against Estonia and Latvia if citizenship rights for Russians are not further delineated in these states. Beyond the territory of the former Soviet Union, Russian assertiveness regarding sanctions against Serbia, NATO expansion, and arms trade with developing countries has compelled several analysts to speak of a renewal of Russian expansionist tendencies and hence a return of Cold War tension between West and East.

In this paper, we investigate the extent and likely impact of employee ownership on the transition process under way in Central and Eastern Europe. Despite the fact that political realities in most of the region imply that sales or transfers to employees often represent a significant privatization path, much of the literature on economic reform has been critical of the potential role of employee ownership in enterprise restructuring (for example, Blanchard et al., 1991), although the ownership form also has a few proponents (for instance, Ellerman, 1990). The relative merits and differences in behavior of employee-owned firms compared with "conventional" capitalist firms in market economies have received considerable attention in the Western literature (for example, Bonin and Putterman, 1987; Bonin, Jones, and Putterman, 1992; Hansmann, 1990; Pencavel and Craig, 1994). What is not yet well understood is the particular strengths and deficiencies brought by employee ownership to the process of transition itself. Our attempts to answer this question provide the conceptual framework in this paper against which actual privatization programs in various countries are evaluated and against which hypotheses about relative performance may derived and tested.

The tasks of preventive diplomacy and conflict prevention are neither self-evident nor value-neutral, as some of their proponents seem to believe. Diplomacy that aims to resolve long-standing conflicts may have to take sides and coerce powerful parties into concessions. Diplomacy that aims to manage conflict so that it does not become violent may have to sacrifice a quest for justice in deference to the powerful. Prevention might conflict with important national and even global interests. If, as President Clinton has suggested many times, the primary American interest in Bosnia is thwarting the spread of the war, then the arms embargo has been an unqualified success. If, however, the primary American and global interest has been denying Serbian aggression and upholding the principle of Bosnian sovereignty, then the embargo has failed.

A focus on prevention ignores the role that conflict plays in driving political change in societies. For grievances to be redressed, they must be vocalized. If they are vocalized, those with a stake in the status quo will attempt to suppress them. Often the balance of change depends on the ability of the grieved to amplify the conflict to increase their support. If we have learned anything from the disparate cases of conflict resolution in recent decades -- the civil rights movement in the United States, the fight for human rights in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the fight for national self-determination in the Middle East, the fight against apartheid in South Africa -- it is that some conflicts must be intensified before they are resolved.

Preventive diplomacy and conflict prevention do not lessen the difficulty of choices for leaders, nor do they really lessen costs. For either to succeed, policymakers must still spell out their interests, set priorities among cases, and balance goals with resources. The president will still need to educate the American people about the rationale behind a policy and convince them of the need for action. Absent well-defined interests, clear goals, and prudent judgment about acceptable costs and risks, policies of preventive diplomacy and conflict prevention simply mean that one founders early in a crisis instead of later.

In response to scores of requests, this textbook edition of Political Culture and Democracy in Developing Countries has been abridged to convey the core arguments of the book in a format appropriate for classroom use.

The authors explore the complex and reciprocal interactions between a society's dominant beliefs, values, and attitudes about politics and the nature of its political system. Among the issues they address are: to what extent is political culture cause or effect; how can its causal importance for democracy be weighed; what are the most important elements of a democratic political culture; and how are these elements developed over time?

Contents

Chapter in Democratic Reform and the Position of Women in Transitional Economies, edited by Valentine Moghadam.

Exploring the effects of the post-1989 developments in Eastern and Central Europe on the social and economic position of the women of the region, Valentine Moghadam explains how the economic crisis and subsequent development, social breakdown, and changing institutions and practices of the state have an impact upon women's roles and status. The volume combines a theoretical analysis of fundamental gender specific issues and empirical studies on aspects such as educational attainment, social security provisions, political representation, and level and type of employment. Several papers use comparative analysis, drawing on previous research into women's position during development in the Third World, and under socialism in the years prior to 1989. Countries covered in empirical case studies are Russia, Estonia, Poland, the Czech and Slovak republics, the former East Germany, Hungary, and Bulgaria. The authors draw the conclusion that women are among the principal losers in the restructuring process, both through the rise in conservative cultures, and through the economic imperatives of competing in a market-based system.