2 Cultural conflicts as conflicts treating culture as the disputed
issue
Any sociological conflict analysis requires due theoretical foundations and clearly defined concepts.
For the purposes of this study, we need a theoretically-informed concept of “cultural conflict”
that can be deployed in empirical analysis. We have extensively outlined such a concept elsewhere
(Croissant et al., 2009) and will therefore restrict ourselves to a few brief remarks here.
We start from the assumption that cultural conflicts are a special form taken by cultural conflicts.
Like other forms of political conflicts, cultural conflicts are in the final analysis nothing other than
communicative situations involving two or more actors (“parties to the conflict”; see Gurr, 1970:
223ff.). The parties to the conflict are partners in communication, and the measures in the conflict
are means of communication, with the object of the conflict being the content of the communications
(the issue). The means of communication may not only be linguistic utterances, but can
involve any form of social action.
We can differentiate between political conflicts in two ways:
(1) As regards the parties involved in communication and conflict:
Domestic conflicts within a country between non-governmental actors or between the
state and a non-governmental actor in that country.
Interstate conflicts in which states are the parties in the conflict.
Transnational conflicts between non-governmental actors of different national origins or
between a state and non-governmental actors from different countries.
(2) As regards the substantive issue in the communication on the conflict:
In conflicts of power policy the communication on the conflict hinges on access to authoritative
positions in government, society or the international system (“distribution of power”).
In socio-economic conflicts, the distribution of goods and rights within a society or between
societies as well as the mechanisms underlying such a distribution forms the
content of the dispute (“economic participation”).
In cultural conflicts, culture forms the content of the communication.