The New York Times reported, “Luos are headed west, Kikuyus are headed east, and packed buses with mattresses strapped on top pass one another in the road, with the bewildered children of the two ethnic groups staring out the windows at one another.”

There have been comparisons to the genocide in Rwanda, and to the lawlessness of Somalia. All comparisons at this point are more metaphor than social science, but I have to say that the images of the buses in Kenya reminds me of the horrors that engulfed my homeland, India, sixty years ago during Partition. Fifteen million or more Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus fled multi-religious areas for homogenous enclaves in trains, and more than a million died in the process. Kenya is nowhere near that type of mass violence – but who knows how far things could spiral out of control.

The top American diplomat for Africa, Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazer, is worried enough about the situation to call it “ethnic cleansing”.

Too often, identity-based violence is reported as if it is somehow inevitable – Sunnis and Shias, Catholics and Protestants, Muslims and Hindus are simply fated to kill one another. Nothing could be further from the truth. Each of the identity groups mentioned above – just like the Luo, the Kikuyu and the Kalenjin– have a history of coexistence and a history of conflict. The reality that emerges at any given time has everything to do with whether the leaders of those communities are organizing for pluralism or organizing for violence.

“It wasn’t like people just woke up and started fighting each other,” Dan Juma, the acting deputy director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission, told The New York Times. “It was organized.”

The same Times article reported: “Leaflets calling for ethnic killings mysteriously appeared before the voting. Politicians with both the government and opposition parties gave speeches that stoked long-standing hatred among ethnic groups. And local tribal chiefs held meetings to plot attacks on rivals, according to some of them and their followers.”

Here is an especially sobering thought: are the violent ethnic tensions we are witnessing in Kenya one possible future for the world? If you think I’m crazy, read the daily news about Kenya next to Jeffrey Goldberg’s recent cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, about the potential ethno-religious balkanization of much of the Muslim world. Goldberg points out that many ethno-religious groups who are now part of one nation state or another in the Middle East and South and Central Asia – the Baluchis of Pakistan, the Kurds of Iraq and Syria (not to mention Turkey) – have loyalties effectively only to their own ethno-religious group, and not to the broader nation. What if the Pashtuns decide that paying taxes to Kabul is not in the best interests of their people, secede from Afghanistan, and try to set up their own government in Kandahar? The article has several fabricated flags for new countries based on ethno-religious groups who have an uneasy relationship with the nation they are now in.

I am not suggesting that the Luo, the Kikuyu or the Kalenjin want their own states. I am saying that creating peaceful, participatory democracies that bring together diverse populations is one of the most important issues of our time. The failure to do that will result in everything from the type of violence and displacement we are seeing in Kenya, to the current Sunni-Shia-Kurdish civil war in Iraq, to the possibility of a whole new map based on ethno-religious groups declaring separate states.

How do we build peaceful, participatory, pluralist democracies? I think the following three principles of what I call pluralism are key:

1) All identity groups have to feel respected and treated fairly. That means that all ethnic, racial, religious and tribal communities within a nation have equal access to educational opportunities, economic mobility, political power and cultural representation.

2) There have to be positive relationships between the different identity groups within a nation. Imagine if Luo, Kikuyu and Kalenjin leaders had built civic associations that brought their three groups together to withstand the anger after the election, instead of encouraging ethnic militias to exploit and exacerbate the situation?

3) There has to be an idea of and a commitment to the common good. Many of the news reports about Kenya emphasize a strong sense of “Kenyanness” - an identity that trascends Luo, Kikuyu and Kalenjin. That’s a good sign. One of the ways that Mandela healed the fractured situation in his country was to appeal to a sense of "South Africanness" that could unite that nation's various ethnic, religious, racial and tribal groups.

Kenya could sure use a Mandela right now. Let's hope somebody steps up into that role. But even if no such towering figure emerges, implementing the principles of pluralism will restore some semblance of calm and set that country back on the path to stability.

And then, instead of becoming a metaphor for ethnic war in a world on the brink of the same, Kenya could become a model of a nation where different ethnic groups live together in equal dignity and mutualy loyalty.