Human history isn’t just a story about rising empires, new inventions, or the growth of art. It’s also — and maybe even more so — a long chronicle of conflicts. From the earliest times to today, whenever different ethnic, cultural, or religious groups collide, a spark appears. And too often, that spark turns into a fire of hatred and violence.
This post is an attempt to trace that painful yet essential thread running through the entire story of our species. From the mysterious Sea Peoples and ancient empires, through medieval crusades and colonial conquests, all the way to modern wars and humanitarian crises — we’ll look at how deeply rooted our sense of “us” and “them” really is, and how easily it’s been used to justify conquest, oppression, and even genocide. It’s a journey into the darker side of our civilization, meant to help us understand why “someone different” so often becomes “the enemy,” and how these centuries-long clashes have shaped the world we live in today.
The collapse of the Late Bronze Age, around 1200 BCE, was a global crisis for that ancient world — one that shook the foundations of powerful civilizations and triggered the first large-scale, well-documented wave of migration and ethnic-cultural conflict. The industrialized Hittite Empire, the might of Mycenae, and the wealthy city-states of the Levant all crumbled in fire and chaos, leaving behind a political and economic vacuum. And into that vacuum moved wandering peoples — united under the mysterious name “Sea Peoples.” Who were they? Most likely a mix of many groups: displaced refugees, mercenaries, and pirates coming from collapsing societies in the Aegean, Anatolia, and possibly even further west. Their movement wasn’t a peaceful migration but a desperate push for survival, a hungry march in search of new homes. Along the way they encountered settlements and cities they plundered for resources, but their real goal was to resettle. The turning point of this upheaval came around 1177 BCE, when they clashed with the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses III — a battle immortalized on the reliefs of the Medinet Habu temple. But this wasn’t just another fight between two armies. It was a collision between a settled, state-organized world and a nomadic, desperate, hybrid one. The Sea Peoples weren’t raiding simply out of greed or bloodlust — their attacks were symptoms of a deeper crisis: the collapse of the complex Bronze Age trade network that kept everything stable. When the supply lines for copper and tin broke down and famine spread across the region, the struggle for farmland and resources turned into a struggle for survival. The stakes were no longer about dominance, but about whether entire cultures and peoples would continue to exist at all.
As Europe and the Near East rose from the ashes of the Bronze Age, new and ambitious civilizations began to expand, giving ethnic and cultural conflicts a sharper, more ideological edge. One of the clearest examples of this was the great Greek colonization, which lasted from the 8th to the 2nd century BCE. Waves of settlers left their home city-states and spread across the Mediterranean and the coasts of the Black Sea. Founding colonies like Neapolis, Massalia (modern Marseille), or Olbia, the Greeks carried not only goods but also a strong sense of cultural superiority. It was during this period that the key Western concept of the “barbarian” took shape — originally referring simply to someone who spoke an unintelligible language, but quickly gaining a negative, almost dismissive tone. Anything non-Greek fell under this label: foreign gods, unfamiliar political systems, different ways of life. And that clash of mindsets became a source of countless conflicts. In the Balkans, Greeks collided with the warlike Thracians, whose culture revolved around warrior aristocracy and golden treasures rather than the city-centered life of the polis. On the northern shores of the Black Sea, Greek colonies had to navigate relations with the powerful Scythian nomads — trading grain for luxury goods while living in constant fear of raids by these formidable horsemen. But the fiercest and almost “total” conflict played out in the west — the struggle with Carthage, a Phoenician naval superpower. The later Roman-Carthaginian wars, often described in political terms, also carried a deep cultural undertone. The Romans, heavily influenced by Greek ideas, viewed the Carthaginians as cunning, cruel, and religiously alien. Greek colonization was therefore much more than planting trading posts. It was the building of both physical and mental walls between the orderly, urban world and the wild, unpredictable world beyond — a competition for land and trade routes rooted in cultural distrust and a sense of civilizational mission.
As the Roman Republic transformed into an imperial superstate between the 1st century BCE and the 1st century CE, the conflicts on its borders—and inside its provinces—became classic clashes between a universalizing, increasingly global empire and communities with strong, deeply rooted ethnic and religious identities. Armed with the idea of Pax Romana and a sense of civilizational mission, Rome saw conquest not just as a military act but as a project of cultural transformation — Romanization. And it was in this melting pot that three very different models of resistance emerged. In the West, in Gaul, Julius Caesar crushed the independence of the Celtic tribes led by Vercingetorix. This was a collision between a world of organized armies, roads, and cities, and a world of tribal loyalties, druids, and warrior culture. Although Gaul was eventually Romanized surprisingly quickly, its conquest was a brutal clash of two incompatible social systems. In the north, inside the forests of Germania, Rome faced peoples it saw as even more “primitive” and resistant to assimilation. The defeat in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE wasn’t just a military disaster — it was a shock that revealed a difficult truth: some cultures valued their own harsh but familiar freedom more than any promise of Roman order and prosperity. But the deepest and most irreconcilable conflict unfolded in the East, in Judea. Here, the clash wasn’t only about politics or social structure — it struck at the heart of identity itself. To the Romans, polytheists who habitually adopted foreign gods into their own pantheon, the monotheistic Jews appeared stubborn to the point of irrationality. Their refusal to honor the emperor as a divine figure, their strict religious laws, and their expectation of a coming Messiah were seen as dangerous fanaticism. To the Jews, Roman rule was not simply political oppression — it was sacrilege. The series of revolts, ending with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and the final exile after the Bar Kokhba uprising, showed that even the mightiest empire was powerless against resistance fueled by faith. In this struggle, the stakes weren’t land or wealth but the very soul of a people and its covenant with God.
As the Roman Empire slipped into crisis, a new and energetic force burst onto the historical stage — one that would shape the world’s dividing lines for centuries. The Arab expansion, launched in the 7th century with the rise of Islam, became one of the most dramatic and far-reaching civilizational clashes in history. In just about a hundred years, warriors from the Arabian Peninsula, initially led by the caliphs, conquered vast Byzantine territories and brought the long-standing Sasanian Persian Empire to its end. But this wasn’t just another wave of raids — it was a movement with a deeply religious foundation, layered over existing ethnic and cultural tensions. For the Christian world, both Byzantine and Western, the sudden loss of wealthy provinces like Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain was a strategic and theological shock. Yet the dynamics of these conflicts were incredibly complex. In Persia, the Arab conquest meant not only political collapse but the gradual decline of ancient Zoroastrianism, which slowly gave way to Islam — though not without leaving a lasting mark on the culture and administration of the new rulers. In the West, in Visigothic Spain, the Arab armies (made up largely of recently converted Berbers) took advantage of internal weakness and of resentment among the Jewish population. This led to the fall of the Visigothic kingdom at the Battle of Guadalete in 711. And it was precisely on the Iberian Peninsula that this great clash produced one of history’s most creative — though often turbulent — forms of coexistence. Al-Andalus became a mosaic where Muslims, Christians, and Jews built a unique, symbiotic culture, weaving together influences in philosophy, science, and architecture, even through long periods of tension and conflict. The Arab expansion was therefore both a holy war (jihad) and a political reshaping of the known world. It permanently divided the Mediterranean into Christian and Islamic spheres, setting the stage for centuries of rivalry expressed in crusades, the Reconquista, and constant friction along the borders of these two civilizations — while at the same time giving rise to places where cultural exchange produced some of the brightest achievements of the human spirit.
If the early Arab expansion drew the first civilizational front lines, then the Crusades — spanning the 11th to the 13th century — became their bloody, symbolic, and institutional continuation. They weren’t just a long series of wars, but a structured, religiously charged collision that permanently shaped how the Christian West and the Islamic East saw one another. The immediate trigger was Pope Urban II’s call in 1095 to reclaim the Holy Land from Muslim rule — a promise of salvation for European knights and of greater authority for the papacy over the Christian world. But under this layer of sacred rhetoric lay older, deeper tensions. There were fierce rivalries among Muslim factions themselves, divided enough at the time to allow the First Crusade to succeed and capture Jerusalem in 1099. That conquest — paired with the massacre of its inhabitants, Muslim and Jewish alike — cemented the image of the crusader as both a holy warrior and a brutal invader. Paradoxically, these centuries of conflict also created spaces where intense, though often uneasy or forced, coexistence took root. In the Crusader states that emerged in the Middle East, the Franks who formed the ruling elite were compelled to live side-by-side with local Muslims, Eastern Christians, and Jews. Even though religious boundaries remained sharp, the daily reality involved trade, cultural mixing, and intellectual exchange. European knights adopted elements of Middle Eastern clothing, while Arabic medicine and philosophy flowed into Europe. Still, this coexistence was fragile and always built on domination. In the end, the Crusades ended in military defeat for the West; the last stronghold, Acre, fell in 1291. Their most lasting legacy, however, wasn’t the fortresses gained or lost, but the deep-rooted stereotypes, wounds, and stories of holy war that took hold in both civilizations. These narratives poisoned relations between the two great monotheistic religions for centuries — and their echoes can still be heard in public rhetoric and politics today.
Running parallel to the Crusades in the Middle East, another centuries-long struggle unfolded on the opposite edge of Europe — the Reconquista on the Iberian Peninsula. Lasting from the 8th to the 15th century, it wasn’t a single coordinated campaign but a mosaic of wars, truces, shifting alliances, and the gradual expansion of the Christian kingdoms in the north at the expense of the Muslim taifas of Al-Andalus. Unlike the Crusades — armed pilgrimages to distant lands — the Reconquista was a fight for territory that Christians saw as rightfully their own. That gave it both a national and a religious character. But this seemingly straightforward clash was, in reality, extraordinarily complex. Frontlines moved constantly, and Christian and Muslim rulers often formed tactical alliances across religious lines, sometimes fighting against their own co-believers. It was on the Iberian Peninsula that the idea of “holy war” collided with the everyday reality of long-term coexistence. For centuries, conquered lands turned into multicultural societies where Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived side by side, exchanging not only goods but also knowledge, architecture, and customs. This relative symbiosis, however, began to crumble as the Reconquista advanced. The Christian victory at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 shifted the balance for good, and the fall of Granada in 1492 symbolically ended the process. But the true culmination of this civilizational clash wasn’t military conquest — it was enforced religious uniformity. The Alhambra Decree of 1492 gave Spanish Jews a choice: convert or leave. A few decades later, Muslims were faced with the same impossible decision. A struggle that had begun as a fight over land ended as a project of ethnic and religious purification. It laid the foundations of a new, unified Catholic Spain — while at the same time inflicting a deep scar on its identity, one built on exclusion.
While Europe and the Near East struggled with conflicts along the Christian-Islamic frontier, a storm rose from the eastern steppes that would redefine the idea of a total civilizational clash: the Mongol Empire. In the 13th and 14th centuries, under Genghis Khan and his successors, the nomadic steppe peoples launched an expansion on a scale unprecedented in history. Their invasions weren’t simply wars — they were cataclysms, brutally and fundamentally colliding the world of nomadic horse-warriors with the settled civilizations of great empires. For the Mongols, whose society, economy, and worldview revolved around horses, bows, and the endless steppe, the cities of agrarian empires were alien, and if they resisted, often destined for destruction. This clash of mentalities produced some of the bloodiest chapters in human history. In China, the Jin dynasty fell to Genghis Khan’s armies; great cities like Samarkand and Bukhara in Persia were leveled, their populations massacred in acts of collective revenge. Rus’, conquered and absorbed into the Golden Horde, sank into centuries of isolation and political dependency, shaping its later despotic and suspicious stance toward the West. Paradoxically, this ruthless conquest also created space for massive migrations, exchange, and surprising tolerance. The Pax Mongolica — a period of relative peace within the empire — connected Asia and Europe through safe trade routes. Marco Polo could travel to China, while ideas, technologies, and, crucially, diseases like the plague moved freely across continents. The Mongols, pragmatic pagans, did not favor any single religion, allowing Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Taoists to practice freely. In this way, their conquests — acts of near-total destruction — also became an unexpected catalyst for globalization, forever reshaping the balance of power and the cultural map of Eurasia.
While the West was recovering from plague and the crises of the late Middle Ages, another chapter of the great civilizational clash was unfolding in the Balkans — one that would shape the political and cultural landscape of Southeastern Europe for centuries. In the 14th and 15th centuries, the rapidly expanding Ottoman Empire, strengthened by its conquests in Anatolia, crossed the straits and firmly established itself on European soil. Its expansion in the Balkans wasn’t just about seizing territory. It was a confrontation between two entirely different systems: the centralized, militaristic Ottoman machine, ruled by the Sultan and backed by the ideology of Islamic holy war, and a mosaic of divided Christian kingdoms and despotates — Serbian, Bulgarian, and Byzantine. A key moment in this clash was the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, where combined Serbian and Bosnian forces suffered a crushing defeat. For the Serbs, this event became the cornerstone of a national myth of heroic resistance and martyrdom, remembered and honored for centuries under Ottoman rule. The conquest was not only military but also demographic and religious. The Ottomans introduced the devshirme system, forcibly recruiting boys from Christian families. After converting to Islam and undergoing rigorous training, these boys became the elite Janissaries or administrative officials. This system was both a form of oppression and a perverse mechanism for assimilation and social mobility. For the Christian population, the millet system provided some religious and legal autonomy, but it also formalized their status as second-class citizens, burdened with extra taxes and various restrictions. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 — the symbolic end of the Roman Empire — marked the peak of Ottoman dominance in the Balkans. This collision didn’t just redraw political boundaries; it cemented deep religious and ethnic divides, the consequences of which — in the form of nationalism, mutual grievances, and complex identities — are still felt in the region to this day.
As centralized monarchies strengthened in Europe and the Renaissance laid the foundations for modern science, a far darker and more unequal chapter of civilizational clash unfolded across the Atlantic — the colonization of the Americas. Starting in the 16th century, the Spanish conquista, led by figures like Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro, followed later by Portuguese, English, and French expansion, brought together worlds that had developed in total isolation for thousands of years. To Europeans, armed with steel, gunpowder, horses, and an unshakable belief in the superiority of their faith and culture, the New World was terra nullius — nobody’s land, waiting to be conquered, Christianized, and exploited. To the great empires of Mesoamerica and the Andes, like the Aztecs and Incas, the arrival of strangers was at first so inexplicable it seemed part of their own mythology — a misunderstanding ruthlessly exploited by a few conquistadors. Yet the Europeans’ most invisible and deadly weapon was disease. Smallpox, measles, and typhus swept through native populations who had no immunity. Within the first century of contact, it’s estimated that 80–90% of Indigenous peoples in the Americas perished, creating one of history’s largest demographic catastrophes. This biological holocaust destroyed social structures and paved the way for physical conquest. Colonial rule took different forms. The Spanish imposed forced labor on plantations and in mines, while the English displaced tribes from their lands, pushing them west through wars and treaties broken by settlers. It was a conflict over everything: land, resources, and souls. Missionaries destroyed temples and sacred texts, condemning local religions as evil, while European ideas of individual property clashed with communal, tribal relationships to the land. The colonization of the Americas was not just a series of wars — it was a systematic destruction of entire civilizations, forced assimilation, slavery, and lasting marginalization. Its consequences — poverty, lost cultural identity, and ongoing struggles for rights — remain an open wound even today.
While the Americas underwent rapid and brutal transformation, Europe — strengthened by wealth from the New World and its technological edge — turned its imperial ambitions toward the ancient civilizations of Asia and the diverse societies of Africa. Colonization in these regions between the 16th and 19th centuries took a different, though still destructive, form than in the Americas. It wasn’t just about settlement or biological devastation; it involved systematically subjugating existing, often densely populated and highly organized societies for economic exploitation. In Asia, the British East India Company, starting as a trading entity, used “divide and rule” tactics to entangle itself in local conflicts between Muslim and Hindu rulers, eventually taking control over most of the Indian subcontinent after suppressing the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion. This was a struggle over both power and identity. Christian Western invaders imposed their laws, language, and education systems, often disregarding local traditions and religions, sparking armed resistance rooted in defending faith and traditional order. Similarly, in Southeast Asia, the Dutch imposed strict monopolies and forced control over the Indonesian archipelago, while the Spanish zealously spread their culture and Catholicism in the Philippines. In Africa, where European presence initially focused on trading posts and the slave trade, the 19th-century “Scramble for Africa” carved the continent into colonies with no regard for ethnic, cultural, or historical boundaries. European powers, armed with machine guns and a belief in racial superiority, brutally suppressed uprisings and replaced local governance with colonial administration. This clash wasn’t purely military. It was a collision of worldviews, where European industrial capitalism and scientific racism confronted tribal, communal, and often animist systems of values. The result was not only violence and plunder, but long-term social disintegration, economic dependence, and poisoned inter-ethnic relations. The bitter legacy — in the form of arbitrary borders, ethnic conflicts, and deep inequalities — continues to weigh heavily on these regions to this day.
European imperial expansion, in its various forms, also reached the far corners of the globe, where in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries it collided tragically with the Indigenous peoples of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Unlike the densely populated regions of India or Africa, these lands were often seen as terra nullius — nobody’s land — a convenient ideological excuse to seize territory, despite centuries of habitation. In Australia, the British began this process with the establishment of a penal colony in 1788, which grew into a quiet but systematic extermination of Aboriginal peoples. The clash between nomadic, spiritually land-bound cultures and the settled, agricultural, industrial British model was total. Forced removal from sacred lands, the introduction of foreign diseases, deliberate poisoning, and massacres — such as at Coniston River in 1928 — decimated populations and shattered traditional social structures. In New Zealand, the conflict took a more conventional, though no less unequal, form. The Maori Wars, fought from the 1840s to the 1870s between British colonial forces and Maori tribes, saw organized Maori warriors offer fierce resistance. Yet overwhelming British military power and the confiscation of land under the pretext of rebellion ultimately deprived the Maori of most of their territory and sovereignty. A different dimension appeared in Canada, where a new mixed-ethnic community, the Métis — descendants of European fur traders and Indigenous women — emerged. As settlement expanded, the Métis twice took up arms to defend their rights to land and self-determination. Their defeat cemented the federal government’s dominance. In all these cases, the clash was more than a fight over land. It was a fundamental struggle over the right to exist, to maintain an alternative system of property, a different relationship with nature, and the right to define one’s own identity in the face of an advancing, destructive wave of colonialism.
Meanwhile, in Ireland, one of the most vivid and long-lasting ethnic and religious conflicts unfolded over centuries, with roots stretching back to the Norman invasions, but taking its bitterest form between the 17th and 19th centuries. This was a conflict where ethnic differences between the Irish and the English were intensified and cemented by a fundamental religious divide — Catholicism versus Protestantism — becoming a tool for political domination and social segregation. A turning point came with Cromwell’s invasion in the 1640s, marked by extreme cruelty and mass land confiscations, which firmly established English control. During the 18th century, the Penal Laws created a system of institutional oppression designed to enforce assimilation and break the Catholic Irish identity. These laws stripped Catholics of civil, political, educational, and economic rights — they could not vote, hold office, buy land, or openly celebrate mass. At the same time, colonization continued, especially in Ulster, where Protestant settlers from England and Scotland were planted to form a loyal community whose privileged position would act as a barrier against rebellion by the native population. This deliberate division of society into a ruling Protestant minority and a subjugated Catholic majority sparked a series of bloody uprisings, desperate responses to national, religious, and economic oppression. The culmination of this suffering was the Great Famine of the 1840s, which decimated the population and forced millions to emigrate. For the Irish, this was seen not as a natural disaster, but as an act of economic and racial annihilation. This conflict, fueled over centuries, showed that clashes between groups do not have to occur across distant continents. They can happen right next door, and the most effective fuel is systemic discrimination, turning religion and culture into visible markers of oppressor and victim, passed down through generations.
The legacy of centuries of oppression and division erupted with new intensity in the 20th century. A direct continuation of earlier uprisings was the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921), in which the Irish Republican Army (IRA) played a central role. Its formation was a response to the brutal actions of British forces and a rejection of the division of the island into Catholic, independent Ireland and Protestant Ulster remaining part of the United Kingdom. The conflict, which seemed to end with the creation of the Irish Free State, only changed form. In Northern Ireland, systemic oppression of Catholics by the Protestant majority continued. For decades, the IRA carried out a bloody guerrilla campaign against British forces, Northern Irish institutions, and even civilian targets, facing counterattacks from loyalists and the British army. This conflict, deeply rooted in historical ethnic and religious antagonisms, though officially resolved by the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, remains a scar on society. It demonstrates how enduring and profound the consequences of cultural and religious clashes can be, even in the heart of modern Europe.
Alongside colonial conquests and conflicts with indigenous peoples, another horrific and systematic process developed, one that permanently shaped global ethnic relations: the transatlantic slave trade. Unlike earlier forms of slavery, this trade, lasting from the 16th to the 19th century, was an industrial, commercial enterprise with a racial basis, designed to supply labor for the plantations of the Americas. It was not just trading people. It was a massive forced migration that uprooted millions of Africans from hundreds of different, often rival, ethnic groups and threw them into a foreign, hostile world. The journey across the Atlantic was an act of collective dehumanization, where language, culture, and family ties were brutally destroyed. Once in the Americas, the plantation system deliberately mixed people from different languages and traditions to make organizing resistance harder, creating a new, tragic community. This clash was not a confrontation between two organized societies; it was a one-sided act of violence, justified by the ideology of racial inferiority. Yet African cultures did not vanish completely. They survived in resistance, stories, music, cuisine, and religious beliefs, blending with elements of Christianity to form new identities. The legacy of this process is deeply wounded societies, where the seed of future racial conflicts was sown. Slavery created a rigid hierarchy based on skin color, with white as master and black as property. This deep trauma, systemic discrimination, and struggle for equality became one of the most enduring and painful sources of social conflict in the Americas, from slave uprisings to the civil rights movement, with echoes that still shape politics and social relations in the United States, Brazil, and Caribbean countries today.
In 1857, a conflict broke out in India that showed what a clash of civilizations could look like in the colonial era – the Sepoy Rebellion, often called the First War of Independence by many Indians. The immediate cause was a rumor that the bullets used by British soldiers were greased with cow and pig fat, which offended both Hindus and Muslims. But the real reasons ran much deeper. For years, the British had divided Indian society and undermined traditional power and culture – interfering with property rights, removing privileges from old elites, forcing Christianity, and ignoring local customs. These actions gradually created a common ground for resistance among groups that had once been divided. The rebellion started in Meerut and quickly spread across northern and central India. The sepoys were joined by princes, peasants, and city dwellers, forming a chaotic but powerful front. It was an explosion of long-suppressed anger and pride, leading to brutal acts of violence on both sides – from massacres of British civilians in Delhi and Kanpur to ruthless reprisals by colonial forces. Although the rebellion failed because of poor leadership and the military strength of the British, its effects were far-reaching. The East India Company was dissolved, and India came under direct British Crown rule. The bloody suppression also strengthened British racism and fear of “wild” Indians, leading to stricter control and segregation. For Indians, however, the rebellion became a shared national myth – a symbol of resistance against oppression that violated the deepest parts of their culture and identity. It showed how powerful and destructive a clash of civilizations can be when outside forces attack people’s dignity, religion, and traditions.
While the Sepoy Rebellion was being crushed in India, another event was unfolding in Africa that would shape ethnic conflicts for generations. In just a few decades at the end of the 19th century, European powers divided the continent, drawing straight lines on maps that ignored history, culture, and politics. These borders, made at tables in European capitals, were the essence of a clash of civilizations: the arbitrary will of an outside power imposed on hundreds of diverse and independent peoples. Tribes and kingdoms that had lived separately—or even in conflict—for centuries were forced into single colonies, while other culturally unified groups were split among different administrations. In Nigeria, the British combined the southern Christian peoples, the Igbo and Yoruba, with the northern Muslim Hausa-Fulani, creating a ticking ethnic and religious time bomb that eventually exploded in civil war during the 20th century. In South Africa, the British crushed the warrior Zulu kingdom and, together with the Boers, built the apartheid system, institutionalizing racial and cultural clashes. In today’s Zimbabwe, the Ndebele and Shona peoples, with different histories and social structures, were forced to live together under colonial Rhodesia. Colonial authorities often favored one ethnic group over others, tying local elites to the administration and intensifying existing rivalries to maintain control over vast territories. The legacy of this period is one of the most enduring and bitter sources of modern conflict. Newly independent states inherited not national unity, but internally divided societies, where competition over power and resources often turned into deadly ethnic conflict. Lines drawn in ink became, in the future, lines of confrontation, and the violence of colonialism echoed long after the colonizers had gone.
At the very heart of World War I, while the world’s attention was fixed on the trenches of Europe, a grim and systematic act of destruction unfolded in the Ottoman Empire – the Armenian genocide. Its roots lay deep in the Ottoman system, where Christian Armenians, though often seen as loyal and hardworking, held second-class status and were vulnerable to discrimination and violence. Rising Armenian nationalist aspirations in the 19th century, encouraged by European powers, were met with brutal repression by the Sultan’s regime. But it was 1915 that marked the moment of final resolution. The Young Turk government, transforming the multiethnic empire into a nationalist, homogeneous Turkish state, viewed Christian Armenians as an internal fifth column allied with hostile Russia. Under the guise of deportation to the Syrian desert, a planned extermination campaign was carried out. The Armenian elite – intellectuals, religious leaders, and political figures – were arrested and killed in Istanbul on April 24, symbolically marking the start of the genocide. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children were then forced from their ancestral homes in Anatolia on death marches through deserts. They faced not only violence from soldiers and gendarmes but also starvation, thirst, and attacks from specially organized gangs. It is estimated that 1.5 million Armenians lost their lives. This act of total destruction was not simply about land or power. It was an attempt at the physical elimination of an entire ethnic and religious group, seen as foreign and unassimilable within the envisioned modern Turkish nation. The Armenian genocide remains an open wound and a source of heated political debate, standing as a dark testament to the depths of cruelty that nationalism, religious prejudice, and state machinery can reach in times of crisis.
The rise of the Soviet Union in 1917 and its domination over what was called the “prison of nations” until 1991 created a unique and grim model of ethnic and cultural conflict, where communist ideology became a tool for a new form of internal colonialism. Although the Soviet regime officially preached internationalism and friendship among nations, in practice it enforced brutal centralization, Russification, and the suppression of any expression of national distinctiveness. This confrontation took many violent forms. For the Baltic peoples – Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians – the Soviet occupation from 1940 meant the brutal end of independence, mass deportations deep into the USSR, and the deliberate destruction of cultural elites and identity, seen as a threat to Soviet homogenization. For the Poles, subjected to repression after the 1939 invasion, the Katyn massacre became a symbol of this conflict. The harshest fate befell peoples labeled as traitorous. In 1944, under the false accusation of collaboration with the Nazis, entire nations such as Crimean Tatars, Chechens, and Ingush were deported en masse to Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Tens of thousands perished in inhumane conditions, while their cultures and social structures were deliberately destroyed. Even though some rehabilitation occurred under Khrushchev, the trauma of these events still shapes memory and relations with Russia. Meanwhile, the peoples of Central Asia – Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and Tajiks – were subjected to forced collectivization, which destroyed their nomadic way of life, and to artificial border divisions that later fueled regional conflicts. Resistance took many forms: armed uprisings, anti-communist partisan movements, and passive defiance through the preservation of language, religion, and traditions. The fall of the USSR in 1991 did not end these conflicts; it only unleashed the suppressed tensions, leading to the Chechen wars and frozen conflicts in the Caucasus. These are grim legacies of Soviet nationality policies, which, rather than uniting peoples, planted seeds of mistrust and hatred that would affect generations to come.
When World War II ended and the British Empire was beginning to crumble, the Indian subcontinent experienced one of the bloodiest and fastest social splits in history—a tragic culmination of centuries of conflict between Hinduism and Islam. The partition of British India in 1947 into two independent states—secular but Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan—was not a peaceful resolution of tensions. It was a political act that cut through the living fabric of society, triggering an unimaginable humanitarian disaster. The “two-nation” ideology promoted by the Muslim League claimed that Hindus and Muslims were separate nations that could not coexist in a single state. When the new, arbitrarily drawn borders were announced, millions of people found themselves on the wrong side. Hell broke loose. Mass killings, ethnic cleansings, and revenge attacks erupted on a massive scale. Trains carrying refugees often arrived at stations filled with the bodies of their passengers. Villages and cities, where communities had lived side by side for generations, became sites of slaughter. It is estimated that in just a few months, between several hundred thousand and a million people were killed, and over 15 million were forced to migrate—Hindus and Sikhs fleeing from Pakistan to India, and Muslims moving in the opposite direction. The trauma of partition was not just a conflict over territory; it was a war over identity and belonging, in which neighbors became executioners, and temples and mosques were targeted. The legacy of this event still shapes South Asian politics, burdening India-Pakistan relations with distrust and disputes over territories such as Kashmir. It left deep scars in the collective memory of both nations, serving as a grim reminder of how deeply rooted religious tensions, once unleashed by political decisions, can instantly destroy the social fabric of a multicultural society.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ongoing since 1948, is one of the most complex and persistent examples of clashes between ethnic, national, and religious groups in modern history. Its roots lie in the end of colonial rule, the rise of the Zionist movement aiming to create a Jewish state, and the growing national consciousness of the Palestinian people. The declaration of Israel’s independence in 1948 and the subsequent war of independence triggered a cycle of wars, mass displacements, territorial occupation, and deep mutual distrust. This conflict plays out on multiple levels. It is a struggle over land and sovereignty between two peoples, a religious conflict between Judaism and Islam over Jerusalem’s holy sites, and a civilizational clash between the West and the Arab world. Repeated wars, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, uprisings, and settlement policies have created a spiral of violence, where Palestinian terrorist attacks and often disproportionate Israeli military responses have deepened trauma and a desire for revenge on both sides. The current phase of the conflict, especially after Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, has entered an extremely dark and controversial chapter. Israeli military actions in Gaza have caused an unprecedented number of civilian casualties, widespread destruction of infrastructure, and a massive humanitarian crisis. These actions have been met with accusations of violations of international law and even allegations of genocidal intent from parts of the international community and UN bodies. Israel rejects these claims, citing the right to self-defense and the deliberate use of civilians as human shields by Hamas. This latest chapter painfully illustrates how deeply rooted historical grievances, religious fundamentalism, nationalistic zeal, and geopolitical interests can intertwine, creating an almost intractable situation in which the suffering of ordinary people becomes a permanent, tragic feature of this age-old clash.
The decolonization of Africa in the second half of the 20th century painfully showed that gaining political independence did not erase deeply rooted ethnic and social conflicts, many of which were strengthened or even created by colonial legacies. The new states, inheriting artificial borders from European powers, faced the almost impossible task of building a shared national identity from groups that were often hostile to one another. In Nigeria, a bloody civil war erupted when the Igbo tried to secede, ending in famine and the deaths of millions. In Congo, chaos after independence, foreign interventions, and the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko cemented violence as a tool of power. In Sudan, the Arab-Muslim dominated north waged decades of war against the Black, Christian, and animist south, eventually leading to the independence of South Sudan in 2011, though conflicts continued. The most tragic example of manipulation of colonial divisions was Rwanda, where Belgian policies that favored the Tutsi over the Hutu culminated in the 1994 genocide, in which Hutu extremists killed around 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu. At the same time, South Africa experienced a different, institutionalized form of conflict—apartheid. Officially established in 1948, apartheid legally entrenched the supremacy of a white minority over the Black majority and other “colored” groups. It represented a collision of races and cultures through laws on population registration, segregated living areas, and strict physical separation, depriving Black citizens of political, economic, and social rights while exploiting their labor. Resistance, led by the African National Congress and figures like Nelson Mandela, was brutally suppressed until the system collapsed in the early 1990s, culminating in the first free elections in 1994. Both decolonization and apartheid show two sides of the same coin: the enduring impact of colonial divisions and the power of systemic violence to shape relations between groups for decades, leaving societies to struggle with trauma, inequality, and the complex challenge of true reconciliation.
The Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) was a grim laboratory where centuries-old ethnic and religious tensions in the Middle East exploded with unprecedented intensity, turning what had once been a thriving country into a symbol of a complex, self-perpetuating conflict. At its root lay a delicate, carefully balanced, yet deeply artificial political structure based on the 1943 National Pact, which distributed power among the main religious communities according to the population proportions at the time. The president had to be Christian, the prime minister Sunni, and the speaker of parliament Shia. This system, called confessionalism, cemented religious identity as the main marker of political and social belonging. By the 1970s, this fragile balance had begun to crumble under several pressures. The rapidly growing Shia population felt increasingly marginalized compared to its size. Armed units of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), after the “Black September” events in Jordan, had established a state within a state in Lebanon, heightening tensions with Israel. Deep divisions also emerged among Christians over the country’s future. The spark that ignited the fifteen-year nightmare came in April 1975, when Christian Phalangists fired on a bus carrying Palestinian fighters in retaliation for an attack on a church. The conflict quickly spiraled out of control, transforming into a multifaceted, kaleidoscopic war with no clear front lines—Christians against Palestinians, Shias against Palestinians, Druze against Maronites, and even Christian factions fighting one another. External interventions further complicated the war. Syria, initially a mediator, became an occupying force, and Israel invaded in 1982 aiming to destroy the PLO, leading to some of the darkest moments of the war, including the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Israeli-allied Christian militias. The Lebanese Civil War was a conflict in which religion and ethnicity were not just a backdrop but the very fuel and target of the struggle. Violence became the only language between communities that had lost any shared vision of Lebanon as a single, united nation.
The breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the 1990s became one of the most shocking and brutal examples of how quickly a multiethnic mosaic, held together by a strong, authoritarian government, can turn into a scene of genocide and ethnic cleansing when that authority collapses. The Yugoslav Wars (1991–1999) were a conflict where history, religion, and nationalism intertwined to create an explosive mix. Deep-seated resentments from World War II—such as the Serbian victims of Croatian Ustaše massacres—were dug up from the past and exploited by nationalist leaders to stir fear and hatred. This conflict was not a single war but a series of battles, with ethnic and religious identity as the main dividing line. Orthodox Serbs fought Catholic Croats, while both groups confronted the Islamized Slavs—the Bosniaks. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, which became the central stage of this tragedy, centuries of coexistence were shattered by the policies of “Greater Serbia” and “Greater Croatia.” Tools of this campaign included systematic ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, mass rapes used as terror, and massacres of civilians recognized as genocide. This war was not about political principles; it was about land and ethnic homogenization—using terror and murder to remove opponents from territories considered historically theirs. The drama continued in Kosovo, where the Albanian majority’s push for independence met brutal repression from Serbian security forces, leading to NATO intervention in 1999. The Yugoslav Wars revealed a grim truth about nationalism: how easily neighbors who once lived side by side can become mortal enemies, and how multiculturalism, instead of being a strength, can become a sentence. It was a conflict that forced Europe to confront its own, not-so-distant dark mirror.
In the new millennium, while the world focused on the war on terror, conflicts continued and flared up across the heart of Africa, rooted in colonial legacies and deep divisions along ethnic, religious, and economic lines. The tragedy of Sudan and its regions—Darfur and South Sudan—offers a stark example of how struggles over shrinking resources, fueled by political manipulation, can turn into genocide and fratricidal massacres. In Darfur, beginning in 2003, conflict erupted between mostly nomadic, Arabic-speaking pastoral tribes and settled African farming communities. Disputes over land and water were ruthlessly exploited by the Sudanese government in Khartoum, dominated by an Arab elite. In response to rebel movements, the government supported and armed Arab militias known as the Janjaweed, which carried out a campaign of terror on an unprecedented scale—burning villages, killing men, and committing mass sexual violence against women. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for then-President Omar al-Bashir, charging him with war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Meanwhile, in the south, a long civil war between the Muslim north and the Christian–animist south ended in 2005 with a peace agreement granting the southern population the right to self-determination. In 2011, South Sudan declared independence, becoming the world’s newest country. But euphoria was short-lived. Colonial-era artificial borders and deep internal ethnic divisions led to a bloody civil war in 2013, where ethnic violence became an everyday reality. These conflicts, both in Darfur and South Sudan, show that independence alone cannot cure the wounds of colonialism. They form a grim continuum in which the fight for power and resources takes the form of ethnic cleansing, while cultural and religious differences are used as tools to divide communities and perpetuate cycles of violence, leaving millions trapped in permanent humanitarian crisis and fleeing death at the hands of neighbors.
The beginning of the 21st century marked a new, global phase of civilization clashes, taking the form of the so-called “war on terror” after the attacks of September 11, 2001. At its core, this conflict is a deep ideological and religious struggle between radical Islam—as represented by groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS—and Western liberal-democratic values. For jihadists, the West is not just a foreign military presence in the Muslim world; it is also a threat to religious identity through globalization, secularism, and perceived moral decay. Their terrorist attacks—in Madrid, London, Paris, and Brussels—aim not only to cause material damage and loss of life but also to spread fear, sow mistrust, and force social polarization in Western societies. This clash, however, is not confined to battlefields in the Middle East. Its most destructive effects are often felt internally, within multicultural societies. Attacks carried out by domestic, often radicalized citizens have challenged models of immigrant integration. In response, populist and xenophobic movements have intensified, treating Muslim communities as a potential fifth column. This leads to stigmatization and marginalization, creating a vicious cycle of alienation and further radicalization. Thus, this conflict is exceptionally complex. It is simultaneously a geopolitical struggle between major powers, a civil war within Islam among different sects, and an internal identity crisis for the West, forced to balance freedom with security, openness with cultural preservation. Unlike many historical conflicts, it has no clear frontlines. It is dispersed, hybrid, and waged not just in the physical realm, but primarily in the sphere of ideas, symbols, and human minds.
In the shadow of the global war on terror, Myanmar is the stage of one of the most striking and heartbreaking contemporary ethnic-religious conflicts. Here, the Buddhist majority—backed by the state and nationalist monks—has carried out systematic persecution and ethnic cleansing against the Muslim Rohingya minority. The conflict escalated after 2012, reaching a peak during the brutal military “clearing” operations in 2017. It is a grim example of how religion and ethnicity can be used to strip an entire group of their basic rights. The Rohingya, who mainly live in Rakhine State in western Myanmar, are viewed by the authorities and much of society as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, despite having lived there for generations. A 1982 law officially denied them citizenship, making them one of the largest stateless populations in the world, without access to education, healthcare, or freedom of movement. Nationalist rhetoric, fueled by influential Buddhist monks like Ashin Wirathu, portrays the Rohingya as a threat to Myanmar’s racial and national purity. This has led to outbreaks of interethnic violence and forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes. In response to attacks by the ARSA rebel group in 2017, the Myanmar army launched a campaign widely described as genocidal, including mass killings, sexual violence, and the burning of entire villages. Over 700,000 Rohingya were forced to flee to Bangladesh, creating massive and tragic refugee camps. This conflict is deeply rooted in the region’s colonial history, competition over land and resources, and Buddhist nationalism, which has become a defining part of Myanmar’s identity after decades of militarized rule. International courts have accused Myanmar of crimes against humanity and genocide, yet the violence and systemic oppression continue, showing the world’s helplessness in the face of one of the darkest chapters in modern intergroup relations, where differences in faith and heritage have become a sentence of death, exile, and lasting exclusion.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime acted like a hammer smashing a fragile, artificially fused vessel, unleashing decades of suppressed ethnic and religious tensions that still shape the tragic fate of the country. Saddam’s dictatorship, built on a narrow Sunni elite, brutally repressed the Shi’a majority and crushed Kurdish independence aspirations in the north. The American intervention, by fueling Shi’a resentment toward their former oppressors and creating space for long-awaited Kurdish autonomy, radically reshaped Iraq’s political landscape. The new system, based on sectarian and ethnic power-sharing, instead of fostering unity, entrenched divisions, turning politics into a battlefield for influence and resources among the three main groups. Sunnis, stripped of their privileged status, felt marginalized and excluded, creating fertile ground for insurgency, which eventually evolved into Al-Qaeda in Iraq and later the Islamic State (ISIS). For ISIS, Iraq’s internal conflict was an ideal stage for imposing their extremist vision, and their atrocities against Shi’a, Yazidis, and Christians were the essence of religiously motivated ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile, the Kurds leveraged the chaos to strengthen autonomy in the Kurdistan Region, seeking independence, which fueled tensions with the central government in Baghdad and even led to open clashes over oil-rich disputed territories such as Kirkuk. After 2003, Iraq became a testing ground for the worst-case scenarios of identity-based conflict: a Sunni-Shi’a civil war, struggles over sovereignty between Arabs and Kurds, and genocidal actions by a quasi-state terrorist organization exploiting these divisions for its own ends.
Since around 2010, Europe has become the epicenter of a new internal clash of cultures, driven by two often connected waves. The first was mass migration from war-torn and impoverished countries, especially Syria, Afghanistan, and parts of Africa. The second was terrorist attacks inspired by radical Islam. This complex crisis put Europe’s models of multiculturalism, integration, and open borders to the test, creating deep social tensions and political polarization. On one hand, the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants highlighted Europe’s humanitarian values and sparked huge waves of solidarity. On the other hand, suddenly encountering such large groups with very different cultural norms, religious practices, and social habits caused fear, uncertainty, and a sense of threatened identity in parts of European societies. The culmination of this fear were brutal terrorist attacks. Extremists on both sides exploited these events: jihadists aimed to prove that coexistence was impossible, while Western populists used them to promote anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic rhetoric, gaining growing support. At the same time, chronic problems of difficult integration simmered in the background. Riots in the suburbs of French cities, regularly shaking the country, reflected the frustration and socio-economic exclusion of second- and third-generation immigrants, often living in poverty-stricken ghettos and feeling rejected by wider society. Similar tensions, fueled by gangs and law enforcement issues, have appeared in Germany and Sweden. Europe found itself caught between the need for humanitarian action and the real challenges of integration, between defending civil liberties and ensuring security, and between the vision of a multicultural society and the rising strength of nationalist movements. This period has been a painful test of whether diversity can be a source of strength or will instead become a cause of endless internal conflict and division at the heart of the West.
Modern Russian politics is a striking example of a new‑imperial clash, in which ethnic, cultural, and religious issues are used as tools to justify aggression and maintain dominance. This clash plays out both inside the country and far beyond its borders. Inside Russia, mixed with the legacy of the Soviet Union, the state continues to push the idea of the so‑called “Russian world,” built on the dominance of the Russian language and culture. This leads to the marginalization of hundreds of ethnic minorities — from Tatars to the peoples of Siberia and the North Caucasus. A symbol of resistance to this forced assimilation were the two bloody Chechen wars, during which Russia, in the name of territorial integrity, nearly destroyed Grozny and committed numerous war crimes in order to crush Chechen aspirations for independence. However, the clearest expression of this clash is Russia’s full‑scale war against Ukraine, which began with the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and escalated into a total invasion in 2022. This aggression is rooted in a long‑standing Russian belief in cultural and historical superiority, and in the denial of a separate Ukrainian identity. Kremlin propaganda, using slogans about “denazification” and “protecting Russian‑speakers,” openly rejects Ukraine’s right to exist as a sovereign state, portraying it as an artificial creation and a natural part of a single “Russian people.” This war is therefore not only geopolitical, but also civilizational and ethnic. Its goals include not just the destruction of the Ukrainian state, but also the erasure of Ukrainian cultural identity — through bans on the Ukrainian language in occupied territories, the destruction of libraries, museums, and historical sites, and the forced adoption of Ukrainian children into Russia. It is a clash between a Ukrainian vision of a European state built on citizenship and freedom, and a Russian imperial model built on ethnic dominance and authoritarian power. This has become the sharpest front in today’s European conflict of values. The brutal invasion proves that in the 21st century, nationalism and imperial ambitions — reinforced by the religious messianism of the Russian Orthodox Church — can still fuel acts that resemble genocide, where the denial of identity becomes a step toward its physical elimination.
In the heart of Asia, in the Xinjiang region, one of the most serious modern ethnic and religious conflicts is happening. The Chinese government is using all its power to erase the identity of an entire group of people. Since 2014, and especially after 2017, China has carried out a policy it calls “fighting extremism,” but in reality, it is a large-scale effort to destroy the culture of Muslim Uighurs and other Turkic minorities, including Kazakhs. This conflict has deep historical roots. Tensions between the settled, Han Chinese population and the nomadic peoples of the Great Steppe have turned into a struggle with a totalitarian, highly controlled state. The Chinese government, worried about separatism and Islamic radicalism in this rich region, set up “re-education” camps. According to reports and testimony from survivors, these are more like concentration camps, holding over a million people. In these camps, Uighurs are forced to give up their religion, language, and traditions, memorize party propaganda, and praise the leader Xi Jinping. Outside the camps, the government uses population policies to break up Uighur communities. They force sterilizations and abortions on women and bring in millions of Han Chinese settlers. Mosques and other religious sites are destroyed or stripped of religious symbols, and traditional Uighur names are replaced with Chinese names. This is a fight for total control. It is a clash between the Communist Party’s strict, atheistic, nationalist ideology and a long-standing culture based on Islam, language, and history. China’s actions in Xinjiang have been called crimes against humanity and cultural genocide. They show how, in the 21st century, a powerful state can wage war not over land, but over the soul of a people, trying to erase their identity forever. Even though the world knows about this, international responses have been limited, showing the weakness of global human rights protections against a country as powerful as China.
Traveling this long and dark path – from the fall of the Bronze Age to the police state in Xinjiang – we face an overwhelming but unavoidable conclusion. Clashes between ethnic, cultural, and religious groups are not just episodes in history; they are a fundamental and unavoidable part of human societies. Looking at history this way does not lead to hopeful ideas of peaceful coexistence. On the contrary, it provides strong evidence that, over the long term, true harmony between such groups is almost impossible.
The lesson from this grim chronicle is brutally simple. First, it warns us against a naive faith in multiculturalism that ignores the biological and psychological roots of human communities. Humans are tribal beings – our identity and sense of security are built around “us” versus “them.” Trying to build a society on radical diversity is like building a castle on sand. It may seem stable for a while, but it is doomed to collapse at the first serious crisis, when primal tribal loyalties override artificially imposed structures.
Second, history shows that periods of relative peace between groups—like in Al-Andalus, certain times in the history of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, or the early days of the Ottoman Empire—were only temporary truces, enforced by the iron hand of a strong regime or a delicate balance of power. As soon as that external pressure weakened, deeply rooted animosities, ideological differences, and competition over resources would flare up with renewed intensity. Cultural and religious differences are not just a source of richness, as liberal narratives would have it. They are primarily sources of unbridgeable boundaries, competing value systems, and conflicting worldviews, which inevitably lead to clashes.
Humans naturally gravitate toward those like themselves, and they instinctively see outsiders as a threat to their identity, resources, and safety. This isn’t a flaw in the system that can be fixed—it’s the system’s core. In light of this, policies of strict segregation, however controversial, often appear less socially costly than utopian attempts at integration, which sooner or later end in violence. The chronicle of human history is not a story about overcoming divisions, but about managing them to minimize harm. Denying this grim reality is like playing with fire—a force that, as 5,000 years of history show, always eventually wins.