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Despite more than a decade of rapid economic development, rising living standards, and large-scale improvements in infrastructure and services, China’s western borderlands are awash in a wave of ethnic unrest not seen since the 1950s. Through on-the-ground interviews and firsthand observations, the international experts in this volume create an invaluable record of the conflicts and protests as they have unfolded—the most extensive chronicle of events to date. The authors examine the factors driving the unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang and the political strategies used to suppress them. They also explain why certain areas have seen higher concentrations of ethnic-based violence than others. Essential reading for anyone struggling to understand the origins of unrest in contemporary Tibet and Xinjiang, this volume considers the role of propaganda and education as generators and sources of conflict. It links interethnic strife to economic growth and connects environmental degradation to increased instability. It captures the subtle difference between violence in urban Xinjiang and conflict in rural Tibet, with detailed portraits of everyday individuals caught among the pressures of politics, history, personal interest, and global movements with local resonance.

The Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict is the longest-running dispute in Eurasia. This study looks beyond tabloid tropes of ‘frozen conflict’ or ‘Russian land-grab’, to unpack both unresolved territorial issues left over from the 1990s and the strategic rivalry that has built up around them since then. Unstable and overlapping conceptions of homeland have characterised the Armenian and Azerbaijani republics since their first emergence in 1918. Seventy years of incorporation into the Soviet Union did not resolve these issues. As they emerged from the Soviet collapse in 1991, Armenians and Azerbaijanis fought for sovereignty over Nagorny Karabakh, leading to its secession from Azerbaijan, the deaths of more than 25,000 people and the forced displacement of more than a million more. Since then, the conflict has evolved into an ‘enduring rivalry’, a particularly intractable form of long-term militarised competition between two states. Combining perspectives rarely found in a single volume, the study shows how these outcomes became intractably embedded within the regime politics, strategic interactions and international linkages of post-war Armenia and Azerbaijan. Far from ‘frozen’, this book demonstrates how more than two decades of dynamic conceptions of territory, shifting power relations, international diffusion and unsuccessful mediation efforts have contributed to the resilience of this stubbornly unresolved dispute – one of the most intractable of our times.

This book explores the complex and creative role of emotion in global politics. From casual observers to trained experts, people care about challenges such as terrorism, violent conflict, and humanitarian crises; these are not just technical problems demanding solutions but also matters possessing emotional urgency and appeal. Political problems acquire emotional significance when they involve human suffering, political controversy, and other qualities of pressing moral concern. But, as this book shows, emotional intensity is also shaped by lived experience of events, communicative practices, and social interactions. The book studies emotional dimensions of global politics by investigating they way everyday social interactions intensify, harmonize, and blend the emotional responses of participants. It begins with on-the-ground events such as protests, speeches, and commemoration rituals and then traces the emotions they evoke among co-participants— both elites and ordinary people, near and far. Revisiting well-studied civil conflicts from the 1990s, as well as the War on Terror from the 2000s, the book uncovers emotional effects missed by research trained on identities, institutions, or interests. Drawing widely from current research in neuroscience, microsociology, and cultural theory, the book reconceptualizes the social genesis of emotion and their distinctive impact on global politics.

Why are relations between politically mobilized ethnic identities and the nation-state sometimes peaceful and at other times fraught and violent? This book sets out a novel answer to this key puzzle in world politics through a detailed comparative study of the starkly divergent trajectories of the “Tamil question” in India and Sri Lanka from the colonial era to the present day. Whilst Tamil and national identities have peaceably harmonized in India, in Sri Lanka these have come into escalating and violent contradiction, leading to three decades of armed conflict and simmering antagonism since the civil war’s brutal end in 2009. The book links these differing outcomes that emerged from similar starting conditions and comparable historical conditions to distinct and contingent patters of political contestation and mobilization in the two states. Indian patterns of political mobilization and contestation produced a nation-state inclusive of the Tamils, whilst in Sri Lanka a different pattern of politics produced a hierarchical Sinhala Buddhist nation state hostile to Tamils and their claims. The analyses situate these dynamics within changing international contexts and set out how these once largely separate patterns of national-Tamil politics, and Tamil diaspora mobilization, are increasingly interwoven in the post-war internationalization of Sri Lanka’s ethnic crisis. The processes of national identity are therefore central to the analysis of ethnic conflict and have implications for its management.