Limitations of theoretical research of causes of ethnic conflicts

Ethnic conflicts after Cold War have become focus of many researchers in various disciplines. Ability to research different aspects of this problem has attracted anthropologists, ethnologists, politicologists, social psychologists, and increasingly theorists of international relations and security studies. Thereat, discussions of the causes of ethnic conflicts have become dominant in literature which refers to those issues. It has become one of the main research questions which brought together researchers from different disciplines and launch a multidisciplinary debate. As a result, voluminous literature of ethnic conflicts has emerged and it abounds with lack of clarity and coherence among the theories that explain their causes. Therefore, aim of this paper is to point out that the existing theoretical approaches, taken alone, do not provide an adequate framework for studying the causes of ethnic conflicts. As this is about a complex social phenomenon, research of their causes requires wide knowledge and approaches that go beyond narrow disciplinary and theoretical orientation. In this paper, author will try to show that the researcher has to get rid of paradigmatic and theoretical orientation and will strive to answer research question about the causes of ethnic conflicts with theoretical synthesis, which include the most important settings and solutions of different theories