Middle Eastern and African Conflicts: Comparing Effects of Tribalism

Humankind has been plagued with inter-group hostility throughout all its history. In the beginning of mankind, the reason for this hostility seems pretty logical; groups living in close proximity probably fought over resources. Mandela's biography, Long Walk to Freedom, and Thomas L. Friedman's book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, are both compelling works that depict two scenarios in which there is ethnic division, or tribalism, in the midst of Western influence. However, there are very significant differences between the two situations that have led to very different respective outcomes.

In Mandela's work, the white people in charge of a variety of organizations (predominately the government and mining companies) capitalize on the ethnic divisions. They use it as a way to circumvent any possible upraising on the part of the natives. After moving to Johannesburg, Nelson Mandela observes that the mine workers:

...were normally housed according to tribe. The mining companies preferred such segregation because it prevented different ethnic groups from uniting around a common grievance [...] the separation often resulted in factional fights between ethnic groups and clans, which the companies did not effectively discourage. (64)

Had the different groups united, they would likely unite to end racial oppression. The situation in Friedman's book runs somewhat perpendicular to this. Friedman illustrates the intense clashing of different religious and ethnic groups in the Middle East (Sunnis versus Shiites, Muslims versus Jews, etc.). Despite international peacekeeping efforts, the Middle East is still inundated with rampant violence between the multiple factions. In each situation, the fighting groups or tribes have very strong social identities. So, why were the South Africans able to unite, while those in the Middle East cannot?

I hypothesize that the central factor that has caused such different outcomes in each of the scenarios is the South Africans' possession of a superordinate goal and the lack of one for the groups in the Middle East. In his Robbers Cave Experiment, Muzafer Sherif explored the development and resolution of hostility between groups. Over the course of a 3 week camping trip in Oklahoma, 2 groups of eleven and twelve year old boys were assigned separate tasks. Over the course of the initial period, they began to form group identities. In the next phase of the experiment, the groups competed against each other in sports, games, etc. As Sherif had predicted, this led to within-group solidarity, negative stereotyping of the other group, and hostile between-group interactions. Resolving the conflict proved to be the most difficult part of the process.

According to Peter Gray, Sherif had tried the experiment twice previously and failed to resolve the conflict using multiple methods; The methods he used in the previous experiments included: "Peace meetings between leaders [which] failed because those who agreed to meet lost status within their own group for conceding to the enemy [...] Individual competitions (similar to the Olympic Games) [which] failed because the boys turned them into group competitions by tallying the total victories for each group" (Gray 528). In the final experiment, Sherif successfully ended the hostility within the two groups by staging a problem with their water supply. The state of the water supply is more important than the earlier competitions between the groups and in order to solve the problem, the groups had to cooperate with each other.

By extrapolating Sherif's findings and applying them to the conflicts in South Africa and the Middle East, it makes sense that the tribes of South Africa could unite while the groups in the Middle East cannot. The South African's superordinate goal was the struggle against racial oppression. They could not unite immediately because they first had to learn to understand each other despite the interference of the whites and their language differences. Mandela observed that "Urban life tended to abrade tribal and ethnic distinctions, and instead of being Xhosas, or Sothos, or Zulus, or Shangoans, we were Alexandrians" (77). In contrast, Friedman describes the inability of the different cultures in the Middle East to unite to form nations:

Western observers of the Middle East [...] assume that all the surface trappings of nation-statehood -the parliaments, the flags, and the democratic rhetoric-can fully explain the politics of these countries, and that tribalism and brutal authoritarianism are now either things of the past or aberrations from the norm. (103)

Therefore, a perpetuating cause of the between-group struggles in the Middle East is its religious nature. For example, Friedman observes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: "This conflict involved not just two nations clashing over the same land, it also involved the clash of two religious communities, Muslims and Jews" (59). Until all of the groups in the Middle East have a common goal that exceeds their religious differences, there will be no peace-and there are very few things more important than faith and religion within most societies. Therefore, I fear, the prospect for peace in the Middle East is rather dismal.

Sources:

Friedman, Thomas L. From Beirut to Jerusalem. 1989. New York: Anchor Books, 1990.

Gray, Peter. Psychology. Fifth ed. N.p.: Worth Publishers, 2007.

Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk To Freedom. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1994.

Sherif, Muzafer. The Psychology of Social Norms. New York: Harper, 1936.