The Political Boundaries of Ethnic Divisions

We use a policy experiment in Indonesia to show how local political boundaries affect ethnic tension. Redrawing district borders along group lines reduces conflict. However, the gains in stability are undone or even reversed when new boundaries increase ethnic polarization. Greater polarization leads to more violence around majoritarian elections but has little effect around lower-stakes, proportional representation elections. These results point to distinct incentives for violence in winner-take-all settings with contestable public resources. Overall, our findings illustrate the promise and pitfalls of redrawing borders in diverse countries where it is infeasible for each group to have its own administrative unit. (JEL D72, D74, J15, O15, O17, O18)

External Intervention, Identity, and Civil War

We examine how external intervention interacts with ethnic polarization to induce rebellion and civil war. Previous literature views polarization as internally produced—the result of demographic characteristics or intergroup differences made salient by ethnic entrepreneurs. We complement these approaches by showing that polarization is also affected by international politics. We model intervention’s effect on civil war via the pathway of ethnic identification—a mechanism not previously identified in the literature. In our model, local actors representing different groups are emboldened by foreign patrons to pursue their objectives violently. This, in turn, makes ethnic identity salient and induces polarization. Without the specter of intervention, polarization is often insufficient to induce war and, in turn, in the absence of polarization, intervention is insufficient to induce war. We illustrate the model with case evidence from Ukraine.

The Promise of Recognition

The key conclusion of this book is that ethnic recognition strategies can be a crucial bridge from ethnic polarization to more inclusive and peaceful societies. Whether this happens depends on the interplay of the assuring versus mobilization effects of recognition. A key structural factor that affects this interplay is whether the society is under minority or plurality ethnic rule. Cross-national and case study evidence supports this thesis. The chapter reviews implications for designing post-conflict constitutions and peace agreements. Further research should investigate longer-term effects, the mechanisms giving rise to these effects, the ways in which recognition policies work together as a system, and how the book’s theory applies to a broader set of political conflicts.

Geopolitics of International Relations, Ethnic Polarization and Internal Conflict

Geostrategic position of a country not just creates opportunities in form of bilateral and multilateral collaborations, it may also pose stern long term concerns and spillover effects in terms of insecurity and conflict. Pakistan, if not a classic example, is a typical case of continually high geopolitics of international relations: its geostrategic location had been praised by international players during the cold war regime through financial assistance; it was encouraged to take part during the Russian invasion in Afghanistan in late 70’s; and was compelled to play the role of ‘front line state’ in the war against terrorism, in the aftermath of the 9/ 11 incidence, in 2001. Early attempts of establishing rebel groups based upon ethnic identity to fight in Afghanistan, while launching of ruthless military operations after 9/11 incidence, against same rebel groups who fought in Afghanistan during the Russian invasion, causing either undue leverage to specific ethnic minorities at one point in time or extreme repression at later stage of history. In order to pretest impact of geopolitics of International Relations upon conflict, and if the interplay of geopolitics with ‘ethnic polarization’ affected ‘internal conflict’, several econometric models have been estimated. Along with testing the impact of geopolitical importance and its interplay with ethnic polarization in distressing peace, other important propositions in estimated models include, how ‘external conflict’, ‘institutional efficacies’, and the ‘role of military in politics’, caused adversity of ‘Internal conflict’, in Pakistan. In order to ensure concurrent validity of econometric models, alternative regressands namely ratings of ‘Civil War’ and ‘Internal Conflict’ have been used. Keeping in view ordinal scaling of regressands, cautions in dealing with heteroscedasticity and potentially lagged impact of regressors, Ordered-probit, Ordered Logit, Quantile regression, Robust Regression, and Prais-Winsten models are estimated. Estimated models strongly approved the notion that ‘geopolitics of international relations’ and ‘geopolitics of International Relations’ in interaction with ‘Ethnic polarization’, have had a considerable and statistically significant temporal impact upon ‘internal conflict’ and rating of ‘civil war’, in context of Pakistan. Other significant factors that contributed to adversity of peace are ‘external conflict’, ‘role of military in politics’, ‘illegitimacy of the state actions’/ ‘institutional inefficacies’ and ‘religious polarization’. Keywords: geopolitics of international relations, war against terrorism, internal conflict, ethnic polarization, ordered-probit model, robust regression, Prais-Winsten regression.

Polarization Without Poles: Machiavellian Conflicts and the Philippines’ Lost Decade of Democracy, 2000–2010

The Philippines’ long democratic experience has been remarkably free of deeply politicized cleavages. Roman Catholicism as a hegemonic religion prevents religious polarization, ethnic identity fragmentation limits ethnic polarization, and weak parties forestall ideological or class polarization. Nevertheless, the country suffered a crisis of polarization during the short-lived Estrada presidency (1998–2001) and that of his successor, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (2001–2010). The severe conflict was a product of power maneuvers by anti-Estrada forces, followed by anti-Arroyo actors returning the favor, given her gross abuses of power. Echoing Machiavelli’s famous distinction, the conflict pitted Estrada’s popoli (the many) against Arroyo’s oligarchic grandi (the few). This Machiavellian conflict ended with an oligarchic reassertion of Madisonian democratic rule through the electoral victory of Benigno Simeon Aquino III in 2010. We conclude the article by considering whether the populist challenge of current president Rodrigo Duterte (2016– ) might spark a similarly destabilizing conflict in the years to come.

Obstacle to Peace? Ethnic Geography and Effectiveness of Peacekeeping

Under what conditions does peacekeeping reduce one-sided violence in civil wars? This article argues that local sources of violence, particularly ethnic geography, affect peacekeeping effectiveness. Existing studies focus on the features of individual missions, yet curbing one-sided violence also depends on peacekeepers’ capacity to reduce the opportunities and incentives for violence. Moving from the idea that territorial control is a function of ethnic polarization, the article posits that peacekeepers are less effective against one-sided violence where power asymmetries are large (low polarization) because they (1) create incentives for escalation against civilians and (2) are less effective at separating/monitoring combatants. The UN mission in Sierra Leone from 1997 to 2001 is examined to show that UN troops reduce one-sided violence, but their effectiveness decreases as power asymmetries grow.

Does ethnic diversity increase violent crime? A global analysis of homicide rates, 1995–2013

Many scholars argue that diverse preferences and coordination failure stemming from high ethnic diversity results in high social frictions, leading to socio-political failure. Criminological theories suggest that crime is driven by very similar processes. The specialized literature on civil war, however, reports a diversity dividend, arguing that when two large groups (polarization) make up a society, the risk of armed violence is increased. Using data on global homicide rates from the period 1995–2013 for over 140 countries, we find that ethnic heterogeneity is associated with homicide rates in an inverted U-shape relationship. Measures of ethnic polarization confirm these results directly. The results suggests that ethnic polarization and ethnic dominance rather than diversity are what matter for personal security measured as homicide rates. The conditional effect of high diversity and income inequality is associated with lower homicide rates, results that reject the view that societal heterogeneity and income inequality drive social dislocation. Several possible intervening variables, such as unemployment among males and youth, ethnic exclusion and discrimination, good governance and institutional quality, as well as several demographic and political variables, do not affect the basic results. It seems that the heavy emphasis placed on ethnic diversity for explaining social dislocation and violence, in so far as it relates to a country’s homicide rate, seems to be misplaced.