Sectarian Violence: Nagorno-Karabakh, Yugoslavia, Israel

Sectarian Violence Author Name University Name Sectarian violence, also known as sectarian strife, is a specific type of communal violence inspired by sectarianism; this type of violence takes places between two or more groups of the same nation or community on the name of religion or ideology. We should not confuse sectarian violence with that of race riots, because sectarian violence often involves the dynamic of social polarization, protracted social conflicts and the balkanizations of geographic areas along a line of the self-identifying group. The possible enabling situations for this type of violence are a non-reliable political system, power struggle, social conflicts, cultural conflicts, and unstable economic landscape. Three main examples of sectarian violence are Nagorno-Karabakh conflicts, Israeli–Palestinian conflicts and the Yugoslav Wars (Maxwell, 2013). The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is an ethnic and territorial issue between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed area of Nagorno-Karabakh and its surrounding provinces, which are under the extreme control of the Republic of Artsakh. It is widely believed that these provinces should be a permanent part of Azerbaijan, and the conflict is due to Armenia’s claim that neither those provinces nor the area of Nagorno-Karabakh belongs to Azerbaijan. On the other hand, the Yugoslav Wars are a series of ethnic issues. These battles were fought from 1991 to 2001 and facilitated by the United States and other superpowers. Until now, the issue of ethnic minorities (such as Croats, Albanians, and Serbs) has not been fully resolved, and conflicts often take place between locals and minority groups. The Humanitarian Law Center estimated that these wars took the lives of over...