Ethnicity, very much like gender, has long been viewed an inescapable facet of our social reality. All humans have an ethnicity, or at least are ascribed one throughout of lives. As such, there is a huge amount of scholarly intrigue attached to ethnicity from across both the biological and social sciences. In this respect, much of the focus has been on explaining how and why ethnicities form and persist through time. Two principal schools of thought on ethnicity are primordialism and instrumentalism. This article aims to impartially review and, where possible, scrutinise both perspectives in an attempt to arrive at a more precise and considered understanding of ethnicity.

The Nazi German entry into the Balkans in the spring of 1941, together with the complete dismemberment of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, heralded the birth of the Nezavisna Drzava Hrvatska (NDH) or “Independent” State of Croatia. Run by the Ustashe, the NDH was an ideologically fascist state that, during its brief existence between April 1941 and May 1945, subjected its minority Serbian population to genocide. In addition to many hundreds of thousands being killed or forcibly converted to Roman Catholicism (the religion of the Croats), many Serbs fled the territory of the NDH for neighboring Serbia. The bitter memory held by these Serb survivors of the Ustashe regime, in particular the refugees, constituted a subversive force throughout the period of the second Yugoslavia, culminating in the Yugoslav Wars between 1991 and 1995.

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Humans have, since time immemorial, contested over territory and, given its connection to resource access, attached great importance thus. Contestation over territory, especially when it is of significant scale, typically occurs via group-level articulation rather than individual. Such claims are all too often rooted in, legitimised by, and resisted on the grounds of, the ethnicity of the group(s) in question—hence ethno-national conflict. Indeed, conflict between ethnic groups, be it violent or non-violent, while not a constant, has been a frequent feature of our modern age. This article aims to identify the key contributory factors that sit behind ethno-national conflict. Particular attention will be paid to factors spanning across categories that hold a considerable amount of explanatory sway, namely, structural, political, and economic. However, light attention will also be given to ‘other factors’ such as those that fall within environmental and cultural categories. For all the contributory factors identified, supportive empirical evidence will be used to demonstrate their relative value.

The Khalistan Movement was an armed secessionist struggle led by the Sikhs of Punjab, in northern India. Perhaps the most haunting memories associated with the insurgency relate to the Indian Army’s brutal raid upon the ‘sanctum-sanctorum’ of the Sikh faith, the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar. While the support for Sikh political separatism pre-dates India’s independence, many scholars, albeit somewhat synthetically, attempting to place a fixed timeframe around the Khalistan movement tend to commence their chronology of events from 1981 and end them in 1993. This is largely because it was during this time period that Punjab endured a heightened level of Sikh militancy. What this article aims to do is to carefully detail the significant events that occurred during that period.