SERBS, CROATS AND MUSLIMS in the former Yugoslavia. Jews and Palestinians in Israel. Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda. Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. The history of the world is one of bitter ethnic conflicts, some based on rivalries that date back centuries. The ethnic cleansing of Kosovo is making headlines today, but it's the product of a dispute that began when Turkish forces invaded the Field of Blackbirds in 1389 and beheaded Serbian Prince Lazar. In the 600 years since, Serbs have been trying to win back the region, and the latest victims of their efforts have been Albanians.

It seems so entrenched, this worldwide cycle of hatred, violence and political disenfranchisement, and it seems to be growing worse. According to one estimate, more than 10 million people have died in ethnic violence since World War II. While the complete death figures in the Balkans are still unknown, we do know that at least 100,000 Albanians were killed by Serb forces in Kosovo alone. Meanwhile, ethnic riots have broken out in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, and Quebecois and Native American resentments have fueled separatist movements in Canada.

What can we do? Is this an inevitable state of human affairs? Or are there steps governments can take to lessen some of the tensions between rival groups.

"I don't think you can easily solve these problems," says Duke Law Professor Donald Horowitz. "I don't like the term 'conflict resolution.' I like 'conflict reduction.' If you come at it with a lot of self-assurance that you know how to do it, well, you're not going to be too successful."

Horowitz, a Duke Law faculty member since 1981, has become one of the world's foremost experts in hostilities between ethnic groups. The author of two books on the subject, with a third coming out next year, Horowitz has been called upon to help reduce antagonisms in Russia, South Africa, Northern Ireland, Nigeria and other societies divided by race, religion and national origin. He helped devise a new election system for Fiji, a South Pacific island nation where tensions between Indians and Fijians have long run high. And he has been helping to draft a new post-war electoral law for Bosnia.

In all these cases, Horowitz has urged the governments to adopt electoral systems that would encourage cooperation among political parties with different ethnic constituencies. If a system forces candidates to woo voters of all groups, Horowitz explains, it becomes harder for extremists to win. Minority groups become part of the government and feel their interests are not neglected as a result. There becomes less likelihood that tensions will develop to the point of violence.

"If you could form these coalitions early and maintain them, it would be a much happier world," says Horowitz. "A lot of the ethnic conflict in the world comes from the sense minorities have that they're just out and can't get back in."

HOROWITZ WASN'T PLANNING to devote his life to studying ethnic conflict. "I thought I was doing Soviet politics in graduate school," he says. "By sheer accident I stumbled into this." An interdisciplinary scholar, Horowitz was earning his political science Ph.D. at Harvard-he had already gotten a law degree there-and looking for a dissertation topic. Someone told him about British Guiana, where an American-educated dentist named Cheddi Jagan had been elected Prime Minister in 1961 with a promise to break away from Great Britain and implement a socialist economy. After his election, the CIA mounted a campaign to destabilize the pro-Soviet Jagan government. A new electoral system was adopted, which led to Jagan's defeat.

Because of his interest in the Soviet Union and communism, Horowitz read every book he could find about the Caribbean country, now called Guyana. What he found was a fascinating racial subtext. Jagan was the grandson of indentured laborers who came from India to work British Guiana's sugar plantations. Though Indians formed a majority in the country, they were deeply impoverished, and Jagan won office on the frustration and hopes of his fellow Indians. When the de-stabilization campaign began, riots broke out, claiming almost 100 lives. Jagan's successor was Forbes Burnham, a black lawyer who kept Jagan's Indian-dominated People's Progressive Party out of power for 26 years by abolishing free elections.

Horowitz decided to examine three places-British Guiana, Jamaica and Trinidad-that had populations of Indian and African descent. In all three, he discovered, party politics had become polarized between the two ethnic groups. In those countries, he found, the electoral systems were set up such that the winner group took all. "If the A's are 60 percent and the B's have 40 percent, then the B's have nothing," he explains. "They're finished permanently. You've consigned them to permanent opposition."

Thus began Horowitz's career of studying divided societies. Horowitz wrote his first book on the subject, the 700-page Ethnic Groups in Conflict, while he worked at the Smithsonian Institution and finished it after he came to Duke. Four years later, in 1989, he was invited to South Africa, which was still ruled by an apartheid government, and asked by a liberal organization for his suggestions about reforming the electoral system.

Horowitz's ideas, while not adopted by South Africa, were nonetheless groundbreaking. He reiterated them in his 1991 book A Democratic South Africa?

"The electoral system is by far the most powerful lever of constitutional engineering for accommodation and harmony in severely divided societies," he wrote. "Unfortunately, one would hardly sense the potential of electoral innovation for conflict or accommodation from reading the standard literature on electoral systems." While scholars focus on issues like political party strength and the relationship between legislators and their constituents, "ethnic and racial relations are a decidedly secondary theme."

In his book, Horowitz criticized the method used in the United States for electing our leaders, a method sometimes called "first-past-the-post." In that system, each citizen gets one vote per office, and the candidate with the most votes wins. In a three-person race, for example, a politician can win with the support of less than 34 percent of the electorate, leaving officials unaccountable to the majority of their constituents. Candidates have no incentive to form coalitions across racial lines, because the representative of the largest ethnic group is likely to win every time. "The surest way to kill the idea of democracy in a plural society," Horowitz noted, quoting Sir Arthur Lewis' book Politics in West Africa, "is to adopt the Anglo-American electoral system of first-past the-post."

Instead, Horowitz recommended a system called "alternative vote" (AV), which requires citizens to rank their choice of candidates in order of preference. If there are five candidates for a single office, a voter can list her or his favorite, followed by second-favorite, third-favorite and so on. If no candidate gets a majority of the first-choice votes, then the lowest-ranked candidate is dropped from consideration and that candidate's second and third preferences are redistributed among the remaining contenders. This process continues until one candidate emerges with a majority.

In countries where political parties are ethnically based, the effects of this system would be profound. It would no longer be to a politician's advantage to run as an ethnic extremist. Nationalistic demagoguery might play well to his core constituency, but he'll never get the second-preference votes of people outside his ethnic group. The more successful candidates will be the ones who appeal across lines of race and nationality. Those candidates might even form inter-ethnic coalitions. "You and I might conspire to exchange our second preferences," Horowitz says. "I can't introduce you to my supporters as a person to whom second-preference votes will go unless you're moderate on ethnic issues."

SOUTH AFRICA HAD OTHER IDEAS. Horowitz's plan didn't "get an effective hearing," he says, because it only had the support of one minority political party. But the proposal continued to garner attention. In 1995 and 1996, Horowitz met with Fiji's constitutional review commission, which was trying to build back democracy after more than a decade of rule by military strongman Sitiveni Rabuka. "I told them the electoral system they should recommend is one that should give every incentive to parties to act moderately," says Horowitz, who suggested that an AV system could mend the rift between Indians, who make up 44 percent of the country's population, and indigenous Fijians.

The commission adopted his basic idea, though the AV scheme was watered down during the political process. Still, in May, voters elected Mahendra Chaudhry, the Indian leader of the Fijian Labour Party, as their prime minister. A racial moderate, Chaudhry reached across ethnic lines to talk about issues common to all Fijian citizens. In a multi-ethnic coalition with several Fijian parties, he was able to win the support of many indigenous voters. "I'm interested in bread-and-butter issues," one of those voters, civil servant Josefa Namisi, told Time magazine after the election. "Labour was talking about jobs and hospitals and interest rates. I'd rather concentrate on those things than indigenous issues."

This year, Horowitz has faced one of the biggest challenges of his career: helping devise an electoral system for Bosnia, which has been torn apart by ethnic strife for the past decade. Horowitz is one of a three-member committee who crafted a conciliatory electoral system, which, he says, is likely to be adopted for the presidential election. "The country will have a plural executive, rotating among a Serb, a Croat and a Bosniac," Horowitz says.

IN HIS RECENT WRITING, Horowitz has addressed the issue of national separatism, as has happened in the Balkans since the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. In 1991-92, Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovenia left the six-member federation, each with a war. Macedonia broke away peacefully. That has left Serbia and Montenegro as the remaining two federation members. Kosovo is a province of Serbia.

Often, Horowitz writes, secession occurs because of hostile ethnic groups living in the same country. But he's skeptical that the process actually works. "There used to be a tendency to think of secession as a form of 'divorce,' a neat and clean separation of two antagonists who cannot get along," he recently wrote in Nomos, the yearbook of the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy. "But if a crude household analogy could be applied to large collectives, then, as in domestic divorces, there is nothing neat about it, and there are usually children (smaller groups that are victims of the split). Sometimes secession or partition is the least bad alternative, but it is rarely to be preferred."

In pre-secession Yugoslavia, there was a certain "benign complexity" that other large countries (like India) have also experienced: With so many dispersed groups, no one had the power to dominate the others. President Marshal Tito worked hard to keep the harmony, granting jobs and budgetary concessions to his country's minorities. But once any country starts dissolving, so does its complexity. The result is often a series of smaller countries where a single ethnic group dominates. "If Group A now holds power over the secessionist state, it can regulate the rights available to Group B, expel Group B if it is an immigrant group, oppress it, or even take genocidal measures against it," Horowitz writes.

That's exactly what happened throughout the old Yugoslavia after the breakup. In the Serbian province of Vojvodina, armed forces terrorized and forced out Hungarian and Croatian residents. Elsewhere, "whole sections of Croatia and now Bosnia have been converted into a wasteland of rubble and charred rafters," writes Alan Fogelquist in his book The Break-up of Yugoslavia. And the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo has been rampant, while the migration of Kosovar refugees into Macedonia has upset the delicate ethnic balance there.

Horowitz doesn't agree with the emerging international law that favors secession as a solution to inter-ethnic conflict. Instead of secession, he contends that "most people will have to find political techniques to enable them to live together within existing states, unless they are prepared to do so much ethnic cleansing that the world will soon run out of soap."

Above all, Horowitz's message is that there are no magic solutions; we must find ways to get along rather than partitioning the world into tiny pieces. "There's no escaping trying to make arrangements for people to live together," he says. "That's preferable to separatism. It's not comfortable to live together, but all the alternatives are much worse."

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