As I write this in December 2001, when headlines daily refer to U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and America's ongoing recovery from the September 11, 2001, attacks at the World Trade Center, it is refreshing to revisit Ted Robert Gurr's description of “a global shift from ethnic warfare to the politics of accommodation” (p. 275) and “strong global trends in the 1990s towards accommodation of the interests of national and minority peoples” (p. 211). Gurr's encouraging perspective comes from his analysis of a large data set of 275 ethno-political groups over years of political action. The dataset was built over more than a decade of systematic tracking of communal groups worldwide through the Minorities at Risk Project at the University of Maryland. (This valuable data set is available free of charge on the Internet to anyone who registers through the project homepage: http://www.bsos.umd.edu/cidcm/mar/index.html.)
The dataset allows Gurr to take a broad view of global trends in ethno-political conflict. This broad view shows “an emergent regime of managed ethnic heterogeneity” (p. 275). Gurr's analysis of trends and dynamics leads to a well-developed theory of the factors influencing the emergence of violent ethno-political conflict. More than a year after publication, his risk assessment for potential conflict escalation in the early 21st century remains an important message to policymakers and scholars alike.