Erin K. Jenne, ETHNIC BARGAINING: THE PARADOX OF MINORITY EMPOWERMENT, Ithaca, New York, USA: Cornell University Press, 2007, xiv + 273 pp., $45.00 (hardcover).

This work predicts ethnic conflict by implementing a game-theoretic interest group approach within a novel but parsimonious three-actor framework. The three actors consist of an ethnic minority group, the majority-dominated regime of the state in which it resides, and an external lobby state whose own majority shares ethnicity with the minority group. This "ethnic bargaining" model focuses on predicting the type of political demands the minority group will make, with the political stance of the majority and lobby actors left exogenous. The predictive hypotheses, drawn from arguments about the relative benefits of radicalism vs. accomodation, are presented in a two by two table (p. 43). The rows and columns correspond to the political positions of the external lobby actor (supportive or non-supportive of the minority) and the majority regime (repressive vs. non-repressive), and the cells provide outcomes. The model of causation underlying the hypotheses is reductionist even for such a spare framework, as it implies that the demands of the minority group are determined solely by the position of the lobby actor. The minority will make radical demands if and only if the lobby state is supportive; otherwise it will accomodate to the majority. The majority regime's response may differ depending on whether it is repressive or not, but this will not affect the minority group's choice of action.

This model is tested on a number of 20th century case studies drawn from Middle Europe and the Balkans. These two regions provide excellent cases for the comparative study of ethnic conflict, due not only to the unfortunate plentitude of conflict, but also because their multifaceted ethnic diversity includes sets of minority groups who differ in one important respect but are similar in most other ways, and single groups who have shifted their political stance several times over the years without wholesale change in their conditions. The author takes full advantage of this, comparing Hungarian minorities in post-Soviet Czechoslovakia to those in Rumania, contrasting Kosovo Albanians and Vojvodina Hungarians in post-Yugoslav Serbia, and examining changes over time in the tactics Sudeten Germans utilized in pre-WWII Czechoslovakia. For each study, she is able to provide convincing evidence that the level of support provided by a minority group's external sponsor was crucial in determining the radicalness of its rhetoric and tactics. This point would probably not be very controversial, but the model tends to downplay the role of other factors, including the underlying attitudes and conditions of the minority and majority within the countries in question. Most of the focus of the empirical analysis in these chapters is on the actions of the lobby state and the reactions of the other actors. The author argues that are were no significant differences between cases or over time with regard to alternative causal variables, but more evidence of scholarly consensus on those points would be helpful. Even though the model limits itself to predicting the minority group's choice, it must counter the intuition that the actions of the three actors are mutually causative, which would suggest the desirability of endogenizing all three actions or bringing in additional actors, such as the international community. Clearly, there has to be limit to the number of alternative models that can be examined, but more could done to explore alternative ways of modeling strategic interaction and of endogenizing actor preferences.. Instead, considerable space is devoted to comparing the ethnic bargaining model to rather crude versions of priomordialist and ethnic entrepreneurship models. "Economic" and "security" models are also examined, but in a purely structural form that seems to rule out strategic interaction.

The one chapter on dyadic ethnic bargaining, which focuses on Slovak and Moravian nationalism in post-Soviet Czechoslovakis is substantively interesting but theoretically puzzling, since the main causal variable of the ethnic bargainig model (the external lobby actor's support) is not even present in these cases. The author modifies the model for these cases by replacing this with the level of the minority group's internal political and economic power, a huge change that deserves much greater explication than given. While either casual factor is consistent with a interest group framework, there is seems difficult to justify having a minority group's internal political and economic power as the main determinant of its choice in the dyadic case, while assigning it no causal role if an external lobby actor is present.

Despite these reservations, this is an original and very useful step in developing predictive theories of ethnic conflict, and I look forward to the author's next work on the subject.

Sun-Ki Chai
Department of Sociology
University of Hawai`i