Every autumn, at local parks throughout the United States, thousands of Scots come together to have an ethnic conflict. Kilted chieftains from all the major clans—the MacGregors and Campbells, the McDonalds and Wallaces—march along with tartan banners held high. Bagpipers parade back and forth, drones erect and chanters skirling. Clansmen and clanswomen let out war whoops as they descend onto the soccer field or baseball diamond. Occasionally, someone denounces the English. Eventually, one of the clans receives a trophy for being the fiercest and then everyone decamps to the beer tent.

These are the peculiar rituals of Scottish Highland games, a large and growing form of weekend entertainment for people of Celtic heritage. But the eager participants, standing in line for a sample of Scotch whisky or a lunch of meat pie and shortbread, are centuries away from a time when the Scots were less quaint: when thousands of people were killed in inter-clan feuding, when Highlanders staged bloody rebellions against English rule, and when the English crown and feudal lords responded with what would now be considered ethnic cleansing—forcibly removing Highland farmers in a sweeping campaign known as the Clearances.

That was the 18th century, when northern Scotland was a land of social conflict, violence, and danger. “Till the Highlanders lost their ferocity, with their arms, they suffered from each other all that malignity could dictate, or precipitance could act...Every provocation was revenged with blood, and no man that ventured into a numerous company...was sure of returning without a wound,” wrote Samuel Johnson during a tour of the region in 1773. His depiction stands in stark contrast to the conditions in modern Scotland, which has been devoid of mobilized violence since the eighteenth century.

But the Scottish example raises an intriguing question: why do some disputes that we now label “ethnic conflicts” seem to endure across the centuries, while others become the purview of suburbanites who happen to spend their weekends puffing on bagpipes? Judging from the Scottish experiuence, it does not seem unreasonable to believe that being a Chechen, Serb, or Hutu could one day become the same thing as being a Highland Scot. But even posing the question in this way raises important issues about the nature of civil wars and the “ethnic” component of ethnic conflicts.

The Nature of Civil Wars

The 1990s seemed to be the age of ethnic conflict. Around the world, the end of superpower competition heralded a sudden upsurge in age-old animosities. Federations collapsed and genocidal wars broke out, each one over basic differences of religion, language, and history. This is one common reading of the last two decades, but it is in large measure inaccurate.

In the first place, the very label “ethnic conflict” is largely a product of perception and representation, not an analytical tag that describes a unique kind of social violence. No violent conflict ever involves all, or even most, members of one ethnic group suddenly rising up and deciding to kill all the members of another group. This is the cartoon version of ethnic war, but it is seriously out of step with reality.

Rather than an entire ethnic group universally declaring war on another one, it is generally small factions of committed militants that execute wars. Governments can also adopt the causes of ethnic, religious, clan, or regional factions, casting themselves as either defenders or avengers of a certain group. However, their determination and brutality can often create the social dividing lines that they claim to be defending. This, in turn, leads to new injustices, which the next generation may seek to avenge.

Mobilized ethnic groups certainly can and do have an effect on politics, but the opposite can also be true: politics can help create mobilized ethnicity in the first place. In other words, “ethnic conflict” is not a meaningful category of analysis until we untangle what we, and the belligerents themselves, really mean by the label.

The second reason to be skeptical about the applicability of the term “ethnic conflict” is that, over the past half century, the great peak in substate violence came not in the 1990s but in the 1960s, during the end of European colonialism. Many of the conflicts that accompanied the end of the British, French, and Portuguese presence in Africa might just as well be labeled “ethnic conflicts” as “postcolonial wars.” Indeed, these armed engagements involved battles between groups mobilized along lines of culture and language. Yet, because of the analytical lenses in vogue at the time, as well as the public relations strategies of belligerents, these conflicts were usually given political glosses as national liberation struggles or as anti-imperialist revolutions. Superpowers were then easily able to take sides, either supporting or covertly working against their proxies on the ground. The Cold War, in the end, largely determined the labels that analysts applied to substate wars.

Third, most of the 1990s actually saw a decrease in internal armed conflicts, not an escalation. The end of the Cold War proved to be a remarkably positive event in many parts of the world, simply because the United States and the Soviet Union ceased providing overt and covert support to warring parties. Only in Europe and Eurasia did the number of armed conflicts increase, but even there warfare waned as the decade progressed. For many regions, the allegedly chaotic post-Cold War era has been remarkably peaceful in comparison to past decades.

Finally, a great normative change has taken place in the international community in the last half century, and it came fully into force in the 1990s: the preference for negotiated settlements over outright victory. Historically, civil wars have ended in victory, but that outcome has rarely been wrapped in magnanimity. Victors have generally either killed or expelled civilian populations loyal to the losing side, which is, in a way, what happened in the case of Britain’s oppression of the Scots during the Highland Clearances more than two centuries ago. Today, however, there is a wide array of international institutions committed to peaceful settlements and a normative legal structure that privileges negotiations over battlefield victory.