WESTERN EUROPE

In Western Europe it is the historic separatisms of Irish republicanism in Northern Ireland and Basque nationalism in Spain that have spawned the most lethal and protracted terrorism. In Northern Ireland the IRA and Loyalist cease-fires are still holding, and the British and Irish governments and the Social Democratic and Labour Party leader, John Hume, deserve credit for their efforts towards peace. But the cease-fire is still extremely fragile, and it is going to be very difficult indeed to convert it into a lasting and honorable peace. The declared objectives of IRA/Sinn Fein and the Unionists are as far apart as ever, and the terrorist para-militaries still have their stocks of weapons and explosives. In Spain ETA has been greatly weakened by improved Franco-Spanish police co-operation, but the terrorists show no signs of giving up.

EASTERN EUROPE

In the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe the removal of communist dictatorship has taken the lid off many simmering ethnic rivalries and hatreds. The most horrific example of mass terror being used as weapon is Bosnia. Less well-known in the West are the conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh and Georgia. The recent attempt by the Russian Army to suppress Chechen separatism is a dramatic reminder that the Russian Federation itself is full of ethnic groups that bitterly reject Moscow's right to rule them.

AFRICA

The most tragic examples of conflicts in which mass terror has been used are to be found in Africa. In Rwanda it has been seen on a genocidal scale, causing hundreds of thousands to flee or to face massacre at the hands of their tribal enemies. Typically, ethnic wars of this kind are waged by armed militias and are marked by extreme savagery towards the civilian population, including the policy of " ethnic cleansing" to terrorize whole sectors of the civilian population into fleeing from their homes, and the use of massacre, rape and torture as weapons of war.

Ethnic conflict is the predominant motivation of political violence in the post-Cold War era. It is important to recognize that the concept of the " security dilemma", conventionally applied by realists solely to relations between states, applies equally well to the rivalries of ethnic groups. When one group looks at its neighbours and decides to enhance its weapons and security forces in the name of self-defense of the group, neighbours are likely to see such moves as a threat to their own security, and will set in train the enhancement of their own power, thus very probably triggering the conflict they sought to avoid.