To use a pessimistic but apt metaphor, ethnic conflict may be less like a common cold and more like AIDS—difficult to catch, but devastating once infected.

The track record of "preventive diplomacy" in the first years of the post-Cold War era is not particularly encouraging. Croatia, Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Nagorno-Karabakh, Chechnya, Tajikistan, “Kurdistanâ€â€”the list goes on to include over 90 armed conflicts since the fall of the...

The collapse of the Soviet Union was remarkably peaceful, but its aftermath has been remarkably violent. To keep its multiethnic empire together, the Soviet regime used a mixed bag of political and economic instruments, developed over decades of Communist power and centuries of Russian imperial...

December 1994 saw the Russian military launch an assault on Grozny, capital of the obscure Caucasian autonomous republic of Chechnya, in an effort to put an end to its pretensions to national independence. Three years earlier, in 1991, a renegade Chechen general in the Russian Army, Djokar...