ETHNIC CONFLICT THEORY

From the perspective of conflict theory, competition among ethnic groups increases in the process of societal change, thus creating the conditions for ethnic conflict and exploitation rather than assimilation. Powerful ethnic groups exclude the weak ones from the wealth, power and priviledge that come with societl change.
Ethnic competition is the mutually opposed efforts of ethnic (or racial) groups to secure the same objectives. On the other hand, ethnic conflict is a form of rivalry in which groups try to injure one another in some way. Its reason is ethnic stratification, meaning a form of rivalry in which powerful ethnic groups limit the access of subordinate groups to societal resources, including wealth, power and priviledge. Competition, conflict and stratification are dimentions of ethnic change. As ethnicity is an evolving or emergent phenomenon.
Considering Marxism, ethnic conflict is transformed into economic class conflict in the modern state. Powerful, racial and ethnic groups force weaker ones into compulsory labour, thus changing the character of the conflict into struggle between economic classes. However, the social Darwinism argues by analogy, that social evolution is the struggle for survival between racial and nationality groups, and the course of this struggle the more powerful groups naturally dominate the weaker races(ethnic stratification).
By the 20th century the emerging social psychology prefered to see humankind as a bundle of propensities, triggered bybthe social environment, rather than a fixed product of biology.
Ethnic relations in a society can be either hierarchial or parallel. If parallel, there's little ethnic inequality but with a hierarchy of groups, access to wealth, power and privillage is determined in part by ethnicity. With industrial capitalism a complex division of labor and greater opportunity, ethnic relations became competative and the result is conflict.
By the way, four patterns of minority adjustment have been identified. First, an immigrant group suffer economic hard ship at the bottom of hierarchy but give way to gradual acceptance and mobility.
Second, some go directly to the nations better jobs. Third, the entrapment of immigrant labor at the bottom and last, immigrants who erect an ethnic subeconomy or enclve.
Mastery over force comes ultimately from the monopolization of the means of production or the control over land, labor and capital in the creation of surplus wealth. Minority groups can also turn into the corporate core in their rivalry with the majority.
However, the functional theory of conflict answers in the affirmative and proposes that conflict can unite groups in a society and will not necessarily drive them further apart. This theory applies to realistic conflicts which arise from frustration of specific demands within the relationship and from estimates of gains of the participants and which are directed at the presumed frustrating object.
Ethnic conflict theories are critical of both assimilationism and pluralism, by implication. It sees strife, struggle and the oppression of the weak by the powerful.

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