Abstract
Facing proliferating ethnic conflicts since the end of the Cold War (the most important ones being Rwanda and Yugoslavia)the international community needs to find new and efficient solutions to ensure peace between ethnic groups and give them political power in order to prevent new massacres and ethnic cleansings. Scholars have proposed many solutions, like ethnic separation (Kaufmann), consociation democracy (Lijphart, Andreweg), and reconstruction of ethnic identities (Brown, Gottlieb) or state building (Tilly). According to Kaufmann, the only right solution to ethnic conflicts is ethnic separation because it sets apart populations and therefore reduces opportunities for further combats and for ethnic cleansings (massacre or genocide). However, I will show in this paper that ethnic partition is clearly an undoable, even dangerous solution. Therefore, ethnic separation is neither an efficient nor a viable solution, and that consociation democracy is much more likely to succeed while being at the same time a much more comprehensive solution, since it allows the reconstruction of ethnic identities and reaches the goals of the state building theory.
