Rural Conflicts and Alliance Formation: A Cultural Strategy

Abstract

Conflict is a form of competition between groups or individuals over incompatible goals, scarce resources, or power making sources to acquire them. In Asia, particularly in India and Pakistan, socio-cultural conflicts exist not only in villages but also urban areas where most of the time dominating biradaries involved in such conflict to sustain their power within the society. Present research is about grouping/alliance formation and its relation with village conflicts in District Lodhran of Punjab-Pakistan. Biradaries/caste's are observed as the key determinant of such alliance formation. Data of 153 respondents show that biradari plays a key role to develop influences leading to separate groups and factions. Biradari with 66.67% percentile emerged as the major cause behind power group formation, politics with 27.45% percent and religion with 5.88 percent. The Biradari system is very strong in the area, with people mostly living in joint family systems thus the groups formed are also influenced by the biradaries. Main causes of rural conflicts were; women issue, land conflicts, biradari concerns and honor.