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Why Do Ethnic Groups Rebel?

- January 5, 2010

bq. Despite its fundamental role in legitimizing the modern state system, nationalism has rarely been linked to the outbreak of political violence in the recent literature on ethnic conflict and civil war. To a large extent, this is because the state is absent from many conventional theories of ethnic conflict. Indeed, some studies analyze conflict between ethnic groups under conditions of state failure, thus making the absence of the state the very core of the causal argument. Others assume that the state is ethnically neutral and try to relate ethnodemographic measures, such as fractionalization and polarization, to civil war. In contrast to these approaches, we analyze the state as an institution that is captured to different degrees by representatives of particular ethnic communities, and thus we conceive of ethnic wars as the result of competing ethnonationalist claims to state power.

So begins newly published research by Lars-Erik Cederman, Andreas Wimmer, and Brian Min in _World Politics_. They argue that specific actions by state authorities — namely, the exclusion of large ethnic groups from power — motivates ethnonationalist conflict. They contrast their findings with other work (e.g., this article by James Feaeron and David Laitin) that finds little effect of ethnic diversity on civil war. Cederman et al. rejoin:

bq. …these scholars argue that ethnic grievances are too ubiquitous to explain the rare event of civil war. Without denying the relevance of feasibility mechanisms, our findings show that ethnicity should not be discounted as an explanatory factor in the study of civil wars. We demonstrate empirically how the logics of contention and mobilization lead ethnically defined actors who are excluded from state power into armed conflict. Roughly half of the conflicts fought since the Second World War can be linked to this dynamic of ethnopolitical struggle for state power.

I’m not adjudicating among these contending claims here. I’ll simply note that getting the story right is obviously important for conflict resolution and prevention. If civil wars arise mainly in weak or failed states — without regard to the ethnic diversity they contain — then fostering state reconstruction and development is a crucial task. If civil wars arise mainly from specific patterns of ethnic exclusion, then the crucial task is pressuring state authorities to be inclusive.

A gated version of the paper is here. An earlier, ungated version is here.