Conflicts in the East: Ethnic and Confessional: Textbook. manual for university students / Edited by A. D. Voskresensky, Moscow: Aspect Press, 2008, 512 p.

A peer-reviewed publication that organically combines proven theoretical approaches and up - to-date factual material is the only textbook of this kind in our country. Currently, more and more information occasions are being provided to the world's media by countries that are generally called eastern-these are the countries of Asia and Africa. If we pay attention to the current "density" of information flows, then we can talk primarily about Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran. Even the Georgian-Russian armed conflict or Somali piracy does not distract, but rather attracts the reader (observer) to such questions as: what is the East? what's going on there? what will be the consequences?

One can agree or disagree with the opinion of the American cultural critic Edward Said that the East is " almost entirely a European invention." But if the author is right, then it is all the more necessary to find out what is important and what is secondary in the countries that we call Eastern. The authors of the textbook under consideration give the reader an incentive for further self-study.

V. V. Naumkin-Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor, President of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

analysis of the problems that interested him.

A significant number of ethno-political and inter-confessional conflicts, fraught with global consequences, are currently taking place in the East. Thus, the American political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski identified a special region in this part of the ecumene - the "Global Balkans", stretching from the Suez Canal in Egypt to Sinijan in China, from Northern Kazakhstan to the Arabian Sea. Today's" Global Balkans", which have a population of half a billion people, are a mirror of the traditional Balkans of the 19th and 20th centuries precisely because they are characterized by internal instability, and their geopolitical significance (primarily energy) causes foreign competition. The region's internal instability is a consequence of ethnic and religious tensions, poverty, and authoritarian rule.

Perhaps the current high level of conflict is explained by the fact that the vast majority of Eastern countries only recently, in the 1940s and 1960s, freed themselves from colonial or semi - colonial dependence and took the path of their own development. And they "got lost" on this path, not being able to adapt to industrial and market-capitalist conditions, to adapt their own cultural traditions to them. It is also necessary to take into account the conflict-causing potential of the political borders laid out in the process of decolonization or, as an option, as a result of national-state demarcation in Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus.

A number of aspects of the national development of Eastern countries are not taken into account in analytical models applied to countries with a European cultural tradition (for example, tribalism developed here). As a result, the models of political stabilization developed for a different environment are not fully implemented here. The most striking example of this is the failure of the American policy of exporting democracy.

Traditional wars are not uncommon in the modern East: for example, a number of armed conflicts related to the Palestinian-Israeli contradictions, the Iran-Iraq war... The US attack on Iraq in 2003 also began as a conventional war. However, the Russian polemicist Yevgeny Messner once drew attention to the fact that in the process of decolonization, conventional wars are increasingly giving way to clashes of a different type, which he called "mutinous wars": These are armed uprisings, the activities of guerrilla groups, including children's rebel armies (Africa), and terrorist activities. Now the allied army in Iraq has met precisely with the "rebel war". This type of armed conflict is also called a war of the conceptual type, since the lack of unified management is compensated by the presence of a certain concept that unites and regulates the situation.-

direct actions of paramilitary social structures. According to the researchers, methods of dealing with concept wars have not yet been developed.

Religious contradictions are primarily associated with the so-called Abrahamic religions, which preach monotheism. Monotheism itself is associated with the idea of a single truth, initially opposed to other interpretations of the transcendent. For the countries of the European cultural area, religious irreconcilability has largely become history, but it forms a conflict configuration in the East: the Horn of Africa, South Sudan, Nigeria, Palestine, the Caucasus, and the Levant (Eastern Mediterranean countries. - Ed.), the Pakistan-India border, East Turkestan, Southern Philippines, East Timor, etc. It is worth recalling the high degree of religious tension within the Islamic world. The general trend is to strengthen the confessional component of ethnic and national confrontation, which provides more opportunities for political mobilization.

Huge human losses as a result of ethno-political and ethno-religious conflicts, as well as a large number of refugees and displaced persons allow us to speak about a major humanitarian and geopolitical catastrophe of our time. At the same time, the conflict potential spreads within the region and goes beyond its borders along with migrants, which also brings up the issues of diasporas.

Most of the world's population (approximately 60%) lives in the countries of the East. Moreover, the highest annual rates of natural population reproduction are observed in the countries of tropical Africa (2.6%), the Middle East and North Africa (2.1%), and South Asia (1.9 % ). Extremely high demographic indicators do not match the economic growth rate. Nor do we see any prospects for a political solution to the main conflicts in the East, which tend to periodically escalate into armed clashes. Therefore, for Russia, which borders on this type of country in the South, it is vital to have specialists who can adequately analyze the situation and make (recommend) verified decisions.

Considering the countries of the East through the prism of conflict situations - their history, development, current state and prospects - is an important and topical task that the authors of the reviewed work have successfully coped with. However, this task is solved by a whole series of textbooks and manuals prepared by the Department of Oriental Studies of MGIMO (U) of the Russian Foreign Ministry. This publication formally develops the book "Ethnic Groups and Confessions in the East: Conflicts and Interaction", but the reviewed textbook is much more fundamental.

The authors see the origins of conflict situations in the manifestation and manipulation of confessional, ethnic and national identities associated with spatial (territorial) parameters. This fully applies, for example, to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and to a lesser extent to tribal clashes in Rwanda, Burundi, and in some other tropical African States, where the struggle mainly flares up around social status. However, in each of the sections, historical and empirical materials are by no means adapted to a priori theoretical views.

As a model of ethnicity, the authors chose the primordialist paradigm, which refers to a real group that has its own history, culture, and territory of residence. This is natural, because if there is a conflict, then there are also its carriers. At the same time, it is difficult to contrast the three main concepts of ethnicity - primordialism, instrumentalism and constructivism - as a number of Russian scientists do.

An instrumentalist conflict over status and resources, as discussed above, either occurs between real groups, or as a result of such a conflict, these groups arise and consolidate. The theory of constructivism implies the consolidation of residents into national (real) communities as a result of the actions of elites to form national consciousness. Benedict Andersen's famous work "Imaginary Communities"is also not about virtual groups, but about quite real ones.

In the conflict context, the role of elites is clearly increasing, which, contributing to the creation of historical and ethnic myths, ensure the military and political mobilization of their ethnic groups to fight for power and resources under the slogans of preserving their identity. It is obvious that the conflictogenic motif "we - they", "friends - strangers" is universal for all mankind, is present in all paradigms of theoretical anthropology, but leads to open clashes only at a certain level of development of political forces that formulate ethno-national strategies.

The book under review highlights large regions of the East, such as tropical Africa, the Greater Middle East, including the Maghreb countries, and Greater East Asia. Moreover, for purely political reasons, buffer zones are also singled out, in particular, the political and strategic "link" of Pakistan-Afghanistan - Tajikistan - Uzbekistan that emerged at the end of the XX century.

However, despite the undoubted fruitfulness of this approach in the work itself, it is not fully implemented. For example, all of Central Asia and Pakistan are assigned to Greater East Asia, while Afghanistan is somehow assigned to the Greater Middle East. There is no doubt that all these countries are buffers not only between the macroregions of the East,

but also between them and Russia. There is no special section devoted to the Caucasus, although the problems of this region are mentioned quite often. If we consider the Caucasus as a buffer zone between Europe and the Greater Middle East, then it could also be included in this macro-region for a number of reasons.

The book analyzes very important, but not all conflict situations in the East that have an ethnic and / or confessional dimension. So, for some reason, there is no information about the situation in Lebanon and Syria. There is also no chapter on the Philippines , a country in whose southern regions the Christian-Muslim confrontation is intensifying. From the countries of Indochina, information is provided only on the situation in Thailand. Traditionally, the authors ' team pays minimal attention to the African region. Moreover, only the northern and southern parts of the continent are considered in the topics of lectures. Almost all of tropical Africa, where interethnic, interfaith and tribal conflicts are very widespread, is covered in the lecture topic "The role of the UN in Conflict Resolution", although there is no such section in the textbook itself. The book does not contain enough literature on a number of problems for independent studies. The sections contain only a minimum of information necessary to get acquainted with the topic. For a textbook, this is quite true - after all, this is not a monograph. Secondary information, details, and illustrations are transferred to the lecture hall. But I would like the list of references to mention the main works on this issue that are necessary for independent studies. Let the student not even read these books (what if they do?), but they will be familiar at least by name with the main authors who have contributed to the topic under study.

Perhaps we should return to the experience of previous textbooks and manuals, where the literature used and recommended on problems was given not by a general list, but by topic. This is partly done in the section where the course program is placed, but only 3 to 15 titles of recommended literature are listed there. However, in general, a certain "backlash" between the content of the textbook, the topics of lecture courses and questions for independent work creates a good creative atmosphere for training a new generation of political scientists, international experts, and orientalists.

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