This chapter focuses on various incidents of politics surrounding cultural pluralism and ethnic conflict that have occurred in least developed countries. (LDCs)

Cultural pluralism refers to ethnic diversity. It’s defined as a condition in which many cultures co-exist within a society and maintain their cultural differences. It can also be called multiculturalism. Cultural pluralism seeks to overcome racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination.

Cultural pluralism has been closely linked to the growth of the middle class and the emergence of politicians who articulated nationalist or other ethnic aspirations while mobilizing workers and peasants behind that ideal.

The fear of and hostility toward other ethnic groups are far older and often more entrenched than modern principles of tolerance or equality under the law. No matter how we may wish for it otherwise, we did not leave violence against outsiders behind us as our nations became modern and democratic.

Ethnic minorities have been victimized for hundreds of years. One needs only look to the nineteenth-century frontier wars between White settlers and Native Americans in the United States and Chile.

Ethnic Conflict Incidents
In the early years of the twenty-first century (2000s), like the first decades of the twentieth century (1900s), much of the Third World suffered from ethnic, racial, and religious tensions periodically punctuated by outbreaks of brutality and carnage. When progress was made in one location deterioration occurred in another location.

In 2005, the Sudanese government (led by Arab Muslims) signed a peace accord with the Sudan Army representing the region’s predominantly Black (Christian and animist) population. The treaty, granted the South Sudanese considerable autonomy (self-rule within Sudan). The peace treaty ended a 21-year civil war that had left about 2 million