A structuralist approach would begin at analyzing the norms and institutions within states with extreme ethnic conflicts such as the political, economic, or military policies in place and wealth inequalities among ethnic lines to determine the likelihood of genocide. For example, when individuals and communities within a state are faced with internal anarchy or the prospect of it, they must take responsibility for their own security. The sides then face a security dilemma in which mobilization by any side can pose a real offensive threat to others. The severity of such dilemmas and the likelihood of large-scale violence varies, depending on the history of relations between the groups, physical and population geography, and other factors (Kaufmann) . Once large-scale violence begins, war itself hardens communal identities, promoting further escalation and raising barriers to de-escalation (McDoom).

Although the three approaches offer valuable insight to the complexity within the link between ethnic conflict and genocide, it doesn’t fully provide the proper holistic approach necessary when dealing with the confounded nefarious act of an ethnic group systematically murdering another ethnic group they live among. In my own story, the causal link between ethnic conflict and genocide encompasses notions of all three approaches, which is a broadened concept of colonialism that includes ethnically distinct minorities systematically discriminated against by another ethnic group within their states. A term I’ll use as ‘intracolonialism’ is the practice of complete political and economic domination of one ethnic group over another/others within a state. The formation of intracolonialism within states was taken from the concept of colonisation. Although groups have been colonizing other groups for ages, Western Europeans were the most influential colonizers as they were first to colonize nearly the entire world. Using the British colonization of North America and the genocide they performed onto the Native American population as an example, it first began with the propaganda of ‘othering’ the native population. As tension between the natives and the British colonial power es