少数民族集団と国境

Most, if not all, ethnic conflicts are fought within the state borders. The proposition seems a truism. However, it reveals certain important aspects of ethnic conflicts because many ethnic conflicts pose a sereious problems of the legitimacy of the extant framework of the sovereign state to which the notion of territoriality is one of the crucial component. Thus, the relationship between the habitat variously referred to as territory, homeland, mother land, and so on, on the one hand, and the boundary of the state in question on the other is a very important issue to consider. The present paper is an attempt to establish typical patterns of this relationship.