State Intervention and Ethnic Conflict Resolution: Guyana and the Caribbean Experience

The article examines the role of the state in resolving conflicts between potentially hostile ethnic groups in Guyana and the English-speaking Caribbean. It argues that the relative autonomy of the typical third world state allows for flexible modes of intervention in various types of domestic (including ethnic) conflict. The Caribbean state tends to use more coercive types of intervention, which either exacerbate or postpone conflicts without resolving them. Other options, including mediation and the facilitation of negotiation, are rarely used. Statistical evidence from elections and events data illustrates the main arguments and calls into question earlier assumptions that coercive state intervention or externally imposed force, a free market system, and ethnic mobilization are necessary or sufficient for national unity in multiethnic societies. The state's monopoly on force does not necessarily preclude its creative intervention to facilitate a more meaningful, unified outcome in the development of third world societies. The article concludes that the state should use its distributive rather than coercive or extractive potential to reward interethnic cooperation both economically and politically.