ABSTRACT
This book is concerned with societal security. It is about matters of security and identity: how the defence of ethnic identity can trigger threat perceptions in others, how escalatory dynamics ensue, and how this comes to manifest itself in violence and, ultimately, even war. I view this process through the perspective of the security dilemma, a concept central to the International Relations (IR) discipline for the past 50 years or so and, since the beginning of the 1990s especially, employed by many scholars in explaining conflict between ethnic groups. Unlike most writers on the security dilemma, though, my main goal in this respect is not simply to apply but to reconstruct the concept itself, to bring questions of identity to the fore. In short, this book is about an identity security dilemma, or, a ‘societal security dilemma’.
