ABSTRACT
ETHNIC passions continue to boil around the globe. Hardly any daypasses without reports of some new incidents of interethnic conflict.Many of the major conflicts today are being fought within states, engendered by issues of ethnicity-from the long-festering conflicts in places like Northern Ireland and South Africa to the new or renewed violence erupting in the Balkans and beyond. The continuing salience of ethnicity is accompanied by an increasing polyethnic norm of human society: Today fewer than 10% of the 186 countries are ethnically homogeneous and the rest are multiethnic states (Talbott, 1992). The "average" D.S. citizen, by 2056, is predicted to trace his or her descent to Africa, Asia, the Hispanic world, the Pacific Islands, or Arabia if current trends in immigration and birthrates persist (Talbott, 1992). This changing interethnic landscape has been accompanied by an explosion of books discussing various societal strains as ethnic groups that cling to their units of identity clash in neighborhoods, college campuses, and business organizations (e.g., Schlesinger, 1992; Terkel, 1992).
