| Summary/Abstract |
This article seeks to nuance previous conceptions of the 1992 Abkhazian conflict by developing an alternative framework for understanding what is commonly known as ‘ethnic’ war. The resulting ‘non-framework’ conceptualises ethnicity and its mobilisation through a combination of constructivist and instrumentalist readings of ethnicity and nationalism with a radically contingent understanding of events. Creating a novel explanatory vector, this approach questions the nature of generalisable frameworks in themselves, suggesting the case of Tatarstan as a comparative example. To this extent, the model developed here suggests the analytical weakness of ‘ethnic’ war as an overarching category and urges us to treat each case within its own causal matrix.
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