Religion:Crusades::Ethnicity:_______???

Question

What is the term for a war just because of ethnicity? I don't mean genocide like holocaust or something, just a war between something like spanish and chinese or something like that.

Answer 1

Ethnic cleansing... and xenophobia is generally the reason... .
However, ethnic cleansing is usually used when one side has the upper hand, like the current problem in Darfur, or the Tutu-Hutsi conflict in Rwanda, or the Yugoslavian civil war, Although I would argue that the Bosnians and Kosovars were hardly the weak underdogs, but the media certainly pinned the Serbs as being guilty of ethnic cleansing.

Youmust realize that almost any war between two nations is a war between ethnic groups. And generally, racism, or hatred for someone's ethnicity, will always be symptom of the population of two nations in the conflict. For example, the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980's was between Arabs and Persians, but it was not really fought for racist reasons, even if many Persians and Arabs are very racist. So, I don't exactly know what you're after. The Russo-Japanese war was fought over territory, but it wasn't because the Russians and Japanese were racist per se.

Nations rarely fight a war only because they are racist. They may wage war against another nation in order to preserve their national security, or to take property of another nation. They may then use racism to motivate their soldiers, but it's a terrible motivator. But racism is very very rarely the sole reason for war. For example, the Tutu's who massacred the Hutsis, were very concerned about ongoing food shortages. They then used racism to exact what they saw as very justified revenge for past conflicts, but the spark that lit that particuliar war was a shortage in the potato crop.

Answer 2

Xenophobia. A common reason for war after religion.