State disintegration and nationalities conflict has emerged as perhaps the central concern of intellectuals and policymakers throughout the contemporary world. This article undertakes, within a theoretical and conceptual framework, a comparative analysis of the causation of state crises and nationalities conflict in two particularly stark, but apparently disparate, cases: Sri Lanka and the former Yugoslavia. The author emphatically denies that the eruption of protracted civil war in these countries is due to preexisting ethnic animosities between peoples. Instead, he takes a dynamic view of the concept of the nation and explains the formation (and transformation) of nationalist constituencies and sentiments in Sri Lanka and Yugoslavia in terms of a process of dialectical interaction between the modern state and diverse civil societies. The state crises in Sri Lanka and Yugoslavia, he argues, can be best understood through a critical focus on how centralist, unitarist strategic elites at the helm of state apparatuses in these countries have, over the past several decades, engendered growing political opposition.
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