Managing Ethnic Conflict

Issues of separatism or secession go to the core of the international system. The decision to allow, facilitate, support, or obstruct efforts by ethnic or communal groups to carve their own states out of existing ones can be the most difficult and controversial decision a powerful state has to make. At the end of the twentieth century the tensions between international integration and national or local disintegration have perhaps never been stronger. The challenge for the preeminent global power, the United States, is immense, and as the controversy over the 1999 NATO operations in Kosovo demonstrated, miscalculations threaten to shatter alliances, bring Great Powers to blows, and render international organizations (chief among them the UN) irrelevant.