A world flying apart? Violent nationalist conflict and the end of the ColdWar

Recent events around the world have convinced political scientists and poli cymakers that nationalist conflicts are an important feature of the post-Co ld War world. Conflicts in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, and Kurdistan have all been prominent in headlines in recent years; bur such conflicts are not ju st a post-Cold War phenomenon, and many have been going on for decades. Thi s article outlines the scope of this phenomenon - violent conflicts between nationalist groups within states - in the pose-war period. It presents a d ataset of violent nationalist conflicts within stares from 1945 to 1996, me asuring cases in terms of initiation, duration, and intensity of conflict, and comparing this effort to other intrastate conflict data collections. Th e characteristics of these conflicts before and after the Cold War are exam ined, to rest the popular notion that the end of the Cold War has 'unleashe d' a new era of nationalist strife. This sun ey concludes that these confli cts are not simply a post-Cold War phenomenon, nor has the end of the Cold War brought an unprecedented wave of new nationalist conflicts to the world . On the contrary, many such conflicts do get resolved, and more have been resolved in the past ten years - particularly by peaceful methods - than in any comparable period in recent history.