A multidisciplinary and multinational group of scholars address the bases of ethnic and religious conflict and the role of ideologies, institutions, and politicians in shaping political cleavages and conflicts. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Arthur A. Stein is Professor of Political Science at UCLA, California, USA. He is the author of The Nation at War (1980) and Why Nations Cooperate (1990); and co-editor of The Domestic Bases of Grand Strategy (1993, with Richard N. Rosecrance), and of No More States?: Globalization, National Self-Determination, and Terrorism (2006, with Richard N. Rosecrance).

Ayelet Harel-Shalev is Senior Lecturer in the Conflict Management and Resolution Program and the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Her interests and publications are at the intersection of politics, conflict studies and feminist international relations, and focus mainly on ethnic-conflicts and women in the military.

Introduction: Ancestral and instrumental in the politics of ethnic and religious conflict Part I: Domestic and International Sources of Political Competition and Conflict 1. When and why do some social cleavages become politically salient rather than others? 2. Ethnicity, extraterritoriality, and international conflict Part II: Ethnic and Religious Conflict in the Middle East 3. Representation, minorities and electoral reform: the case of the Palestinian minority in Israel 4. The paradox of power-sharing: stability and fragility in postwar Lebanon 5. Changing Islam, changing the world: contrasting visions within political Islam Part III: Ethnic and Religious Conflict in Asia 6. The "ethnic" in Indonesia's communal conflicts: violence in Ambon, Poso, and Sambas 7. Gendering ethnic conflicts: minority women in divided societies - the case of Muslim women in India