The Language of the Unheard? Ethno-Political Exclusion and Ethnic Riots in Africa

Ethnic riots are sporadic and localized incidents of low-intensity violence, with civilians from one ethnic group engaging in vicious attacks on a rival ethnic group. While systematic research on ethnic violence has almost exclusively focused on organized armed conflict, comparably little quantitative research has considered the causes of low-intensity ethnic violence. Building on existing case-based research on inequality and ethnic riots, this article argues that ethnic rioting can be explained by collective motivations for group violence that emerge from highly unequal local ethno-political configurations, where politically dominant groups coexist with groups that are discriminated or have recently lost political power. To test this argument, the article deploys a spatially disaggregated analysis of all African states between 1990 and 2008, combining new dyadic data capturing the location of ethnic riots with disaggregated grid-level data on ethno-political representation. I find ethnic riots are more likely to occur in discriminated group areas, in locations where a group has recently lost political representation and where such groups live in close proximity of politically dominant groups.