Absence of Social Capital May Lead to Conflict

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, in a number of articles and books, has referred to the quality known as social capital. It’s the network of thick connections that keep citizens engaged in collective activities on behalf of all.

It rests on a set of mutual understandings about the kinds of behaviour people can expect from one another, and comes about when people all have mutually reinforcing ties across a wide spectrum of civil society institutions.

On the other hand, there is often a distinct shortage of social capital in heterogeneous states inhabited by groups that may share little in common or even distrust each other.

Altruism and community cooperation is rarer, friends across groups fewer, and detachment from and distrust of public institutions is the norm in these entities. When such empires or multi-ethnic states collapse, ethno-nationalism claims victims.

Pakistani author Bapsi Sidhwa’s 1991 novel Cracking India is written from the point of view of a young girl who is surrounded by the ethno-religious violence and dislocations that accompany the partitioning of India in 1947.

“One day everybody is themselves,” Lenny, the daughter of a Parsi family in Lahore, observes, but soon each is shrinking into his or her generalized ethnic identity. “India is going to be broken,” she realizes. “And what happens if they break it where our house is?”

The demise of the Soviet Union resulted in massive displacements of populations. In Belarusian investigative journalist Svetlana Alexievich’s 2016 book Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future, a Russian refugee from now-sovereign Tajikistan aptly summarizes her own fate:

“In Dushanbe, I worked as the deputy chief of the railway station, and there was another deputy who was Tajik. Our children grew up together.

“He used to call me ‘little sister, my Russian sister.’ And suddenly he walks over – we shared an office – stops in front of my desk and shouts: ‘When are you going back home to Russia? This is our land!’ ”

An article by Dexter Filkins, “Before the Food,” in the January 2, 2017 New Yorker magazine, describes some of the ethnic enmity in the chaos of post-2003 Iraq.

In Wanke, a small farming community he finds Mohammed Nazir, a Kurdish farmer, irrigating his field. For years, Nazir told Filkins, Wanke was a mixed Arab-Kurdish community.

But when Islamic State fighters swept in, during the summer of 2014, many of his Arab neighbours stepped forward to help the invaders. “They told us, ‘This is not a Kurdish town anymore,’ ” he said.

“It was humiliating. They started ordering us around. I knew their children. I went to their weddings. They betrayed everything in life.”

Nazir and his family escaped to a nearby village, where they lived with relatives for a year and a half before the insurgents were expelled from Wanke.

When the family moves back, Nazir finds that his Arab neighbors had fled with the retreating invaders. “They are not welcome back here,” he declares.

Such forms of ethnic cleansing, whether informal or forced, are typical in situations of conflict across the globe, especially in the case of partitions, among them 1974 Cyprus, 1922 Ireland, and 1948 Palestine.

Trust between rival groups was virtually non-existent, and social capital was in short supply, leading to massive violence.