By Arun Kumar, IANS
Washington : Based on a study of ethnic violence in India and former Yugoslavia, American scientists suggest that such conflict may be prevented by either integration or separation of communities.
Like molecules in a chemist’s test tube, different ethnic or cultural groups interact differently depending on the degree to which they are mixed together, say May Lim and colleagues at the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) and Brandeis University in Massachusetts.
Drawing from the concept of phase separation in chemistry, they show that whether groups engage in violence or coexist peacefully can be explained by how well-defined the boundaries between the groups are.
The authors devised a mathematical model based on the assumption that violence does not arise in highly mixed regions, since groups of the same type do not consider the space to be their own, according to the novel study published in Science magazine.
“Our research shows that violence takes place when an ethnic group is large enough to impose cultural norms on public spaces, but not large enough to prevent those norms from being broken,” said Lim. “Usually this occurs in places where boundaries between groups are unclear.”
Reflecting an emerging direction in science applied to social policy, the study applies the scientific principles of pattern formation – which are used to describe, for example, how chemicals separate by type or phase – to the huge social problem of ethnic conflict.
The researchers discovered that ethnic violence occurs in certain predictable patterns, just like other collective behaviours in physical, biological and social complex systems.
“The concept of pattern formation, while it may have been originally developed to understand chemical systems, is really a scientific model of collective behaviours, in which you look at those aspects that