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 term ‘refugee’ – defined as someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war or violence – carries with it many connotations, ranging from ‘victim’, ‘helpless’, ‘destitute’, on the sympathetic side, to a ‘societal burden’ or ‘bogus’ on the more cynical. In this vein, the link between refugees and the phenomenon known as ethno-national conflict, for the most part, seems a clear one – principally that refugees are the victims, or by-products, of ethno-national conflict in their homelands. This linkage is by no means a controversial one, nor one that this paper seeks to dispute. Rather, what this paper sets out to do is convey that the relationship between refugees and ethno-national conflict is by no means one-directional, by demonstrating that the arrival of refugees, specifically those who had faced ethnic persecution in their homelands, actually generates, under certain conditions, subsequent ethno-national conflict.

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.

While students of nationalism, ardent primordialists aside, will be fully aware that all nations are, at their core, artificial constructs, there is nonetheless an implicit acceptance that some nations are more artificial than others. To suggest that certain nations are more artificial than others is not, on its own, an absurd claim, providing, of course, that appropriate criteria are used to measure this “artificiality” against. One country that has had to bear such charges is India, namely because, it is said, its people are far too diverse to be realistically considered members of a singular nation and because it lacks sufficient antiquity as a nation. This article will seek to respond to such charges by providing a glimpse into India’s past and ancient belief systems that many laypeople remain ignorant of, the knowledge of which will significantly help to challenge the claim that India is nothing but an artificial construct.