"Imposed Mixing" of ethnic groups recommended

The academic journal article abstracted below (fuller summary here) is a bit alarming. It makes the unremarkable observation that the longer and vaguer are your borders with another group or nation, the more likely you are to get into conflict with the other group or nation. The recommendations the authors come up with from that are however a problem.

One recommendation -- strong and secure borders between different groups -- would I think be generally hailed by conservatives. But there is another very Leftist recommendation: "imposed mixing". Such an idea might seem impossibly Fascistic but some versions of it are sometimes agitated for by Leftists. They want to break up the voluntary self-segregation of blacks and whites by busing blacks into white areas or putting welfare housing into white areas, for instance.

We know pretty well now how that works out. Whites just keep moving away in order to keep themselves and their children safe from black crime and violence.

But what if a Leftist government seized on the study below as "scientific" justification for PREVENTING white flight in some way? It could happen. That the result would be INCREASED conflict we all know but Leftists are very good at ignoring the obvious.

So, if we are being all scientific, maybe I should draw attention to summaries of the scientific EVIDENCE for what the authors below propose. See here and here. DOES mixing people from different groups produce more harmony? The answer is that "It all depends" and what it depends on is rarely easily foreseeable. In short, the "mixing" policy recommendation below has already had lots of scientific testing and the testing does not support it.

Global Pattern Formation and Ethnic/Cultural Violence

By May Lim et al.

We identify a process of global pattern formation that causes regions to differentiate by culture. Violence arises at boundaries between regions that are not sufficiently well defined. We model cultural differentiation as a separation of groups whose members prefer similar neighbors, with a characteristic group size at which violence occurs. Application of this model to the area of the former Yugoslavia and to India accurately predicts the locations of reported conflict. This model also points to imposed mixing or boundary clarification as mechanisms for promoting peace.

Science 14 September 2007: Vol. 317. no. 5844, pp. 1540 - 1544

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