Introduction
by Jeremiah D. Sullivan

This issue of Swords and Ploughshares features articles written by four graduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The articles describe research each author has conducted as part of her Ph.D. program.

In the opening article, Tracy Kuperus describes her research on the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) of South Africa, an institution that played a significant role in South African society throughout the apartheid years. The DRC, representing slightly more than one-third of the white population and almost two-thirds of the Afrikaner population provided ideological support and legitimation of government racial policy during the formative years of apartheid and thereafter. The story reminds us again that governments and government policies can never be fully understood (or changed) in isolation from the institutions of civil society.

In the second article, Tamara Resler describes the results of a survey on ethnonationalism she conducted in Russia, Ukraine, and Lithuania. Respondents included government officials, leaders representing national minorities, journalists, and scholars. The survey was designed to determine the relative importance of foreign and domestic factors in establishing policies toward minorities in each of the states surveyed. Sharp differences emerged. To a remarkable degree these differences can be understood in terms of the respondents’ views of the stability of domestic affairs and the degree to which they considered the position of the state in the international order as important to future development. The results have clear policy relevance.

In her article on managing diversity in a multicultural state, Swarna Rajagopalan draws upon her deep knowledge of Indian society and history to discuss strategies that are integrative and strategies that are destructive to state coherence and stability. Especially insightful is her analysis of states that were once successful practitioners of integrative strategies, but subsequently broke apart. She argues that integrative strategies often carry within themselves the seeds of their own destruction, especially strategies that lead to rigid definitions of “privileged” and “underprivileged” groups in a society.

In the final article of this issue, Piper Hodson looks at one of the high technology arms industries that has been severely impacted by the end of the Cold War—fighter aircraft production. She reports on a cooperative program involving Western Europe, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Spain to design and produce a new interceptor called the European Fighter Aircraft (EFA). In addition to seeing the EFA project as providing jobs in their beleaguered defense industries, participating states see the project as a way to maintain the ability to produce fighter aircraft independently in the future, should it ever become necessary. Clearly, in Europe and in the United States, the legacy of the vast military-industrial complexes built up during the Cold War will influence national and international agendas for a long time.