World Student Community for Sustainable Development

The terrorist acts that have recently taken place in Moscow, Kenya and NYC once again proved that sequences of conflicts can be dangerous. Every year about 30 armed conflicts take place in the world [20]. In the sustainable future peaceful conflict resolution is essential. In the paper the sequence of methods to be used in solving an ethnic conflict is proposed and tested on the conflict between the Russian Federation and the Chechen Republic. This sequence includes varieties of the mathematical methods and methods of systems theory. This model is a good basis for the development of a General Theory of Conflict, in which international students of different backgrounds can participate.

The mankind today is very diverse. It represents quite a complicated ethnic system that includes many thousands of ethnic communities that differ from each other by both the population and the level of development. The unevennes of the socio-economic, ethnic and demographic proccesses in the development of nations told upon the polictical map of the world. All the ethnic communities on the Earth are comprized in about 200 states [15]. That is why the majority of the nowdays countries are poli-ethnic. For example, in India there are several hundreds of ethnic communities, Indonesia has 150 ethnic groups [15], Russian Federation has 128 ethnic groups [3]. Such a situation both in the world in general and the Russian Federation leads to the appearnce of different goals of all these diverse groups. Such a situation leads to a conflict, at first implicit, but with the potential to become explicit and maybe dangerous with unpredictable sequences. These sequences may be the terrorist acts (NYC on Sep. 11th , 2001 and Moscow in Oct., 2002). Both of these terrorist acts were fulfilled by the representatives of one nation against the other. These events are the results of the conflicts of interests, and in the science known are several types of conflicts such as social, religious, political, ethnic, cultural, ecological, interpersonal and economic conflicts, and quite often these types of conflicts are mixed, or closely correlated. The best example for a conflict that is on the edge between being an ethnic and interpersonal is the fact that most of the Chinese and Arabic students of St. Petersburg State Politechnical University had to miss classes on the 20nd of April 2002. They were afraid of walking outside on that day which is Hitlerâ€^TMs birthday and the police warned international students that some extreme gangs were planning to riot on that day. The best solution would be to view those conflicts equally i.e. to have a sequence of methods to solve all kinds of conflicts. People who are responsible for solving conflicts usually use their experience or the methods used by other people solving other conflicts that are mainly described verbally and do not suggest mathematical analysis with the only exceptions such as the work of Thomas Saaty [14] and recently published V.A.Svetlovâ€^TMs book [17]. These works mainly deal with solving armed conflicts, which are usually results of ethnic, economic or other conflicts. It is no good since each conflict is different and methods used in solving one of them cannot help in solving the other unless a structurally arranged General Theory of Conflict is created.

By Kostya. N. Vasiliev,St. Petersburg State Politechnical University, St.Petersburg, Russia