STUDY EXPLORES ROOTS OF ETHNIC VIOLENCE

PhysOrg.com
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April 16 2009

A new UCLA-led study challenges the popular perception that ethnic
diversity is to blame for sectarian conflicts in Iraq and Northern
Ireland, recent tensions in Tibet, and ethnic violence in post-election
Kenya.

"Countries that are ethnically diverse do not experience more conflict
than their more homogenous counterparts," said Andreas Wimmer,
the study’s lead author and a UCLA professor of sociology. "Rather,
conflict breaks out when large segments of the population are excluded
from access to government because of their ethnicity."

In fact, a country that excludes 80 percent or more of its population
on the basis of ethnicity is more than three times as likely to have a
civil war as a wholly inclusive country, Wimmer and his team calculate.

The effects of ethnic exclusion proved to be as important as
substantial differences in a country’s per capita income, a
well-recognized risk factor for civil war.

"If you want peace in countries with ethnic conflict, you have to
rearrange government to include real power-sharing with all ethnic
groups," said Lars-Erik Cederman, study co-author and a former
assistant professor of political science at UCLA who now serves as
a professor of international conflict research at the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. "Eliminating barriers to
political participation may sound like common sense, but this research
for the first time pinpoints the dramatic risk of failing to do so."

The findings appear in the April issue of the American Sociological
Review.

Wimmer and Cederman led a team of social scientists, including UCLA
political science graduate student Brian Min, that spent close to three
years building a dataset of ethnic power relations in 155 countries
from 1946 to 2005, based on the expert advice of nearly 100 country
specialists from universities across the world.

Area specialists were asked to identify the politically relevant
ethnic groups within a country for each year since 1945 and then
estimate the extent of each group’s access to political power on
a six-point scale, ranging from a total monopoly on power to being
powerless and discriminated against. An ethnic group was considered
to be excluded if its members were absent from the highest levels of
regional and national government.

For a handful of countries — both very homogenous ones, such as Korea,
and very heterogeneous ones, such as Tanzania — ethnicity was not
politically relevant at all. In the rest of the countries, the risk
of armed conflict rose in proportion to the degree of ethnic exclusion.

"The odds of having a war — rather than peace — increase by a factor
of 1.12 for every additional 10 percent of the population excluded
from central government power," Wimmer said.

Particularly at risk, according to the researchers, are so-called
ethnocracies — countries in which an ethnic minority representing 20
percent or less of the population monopolizes power. Examples include
Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Rwanda under the Tutsi-dominated government,
Sudan since 1954, Syria in recent history, Liberia until the outbreak
of civil war in 1980 and Rhodesia before the white minority government
was overthrown.

In addition to various ethnic power configurations derived from
this dataset, the study tested 10 other potential risk factors for
political violence, including economic development, ethnic diversity,
population size, geography, degree of democratization and even the
presence of oil reserves — the last on the theory that rebels might
be inspired to take up arms against the government when control of
lucrative natural resources is at stake.

Per capita gross domestic product proved to be as important a risk
factor as ethnic exclusion. In line with previous research, the study
found that lowering national per capita annual income from $13,000
to $6,000 more than doubles the risk of armed conflict.

Other important risks include a large population size and a political
system somewhere between dictatorship and democracy, sometimes called
"anocracy." Examples of anocracies include present-day Pakistan,
Sri Lanka, Nigeria and Armenia.

Of the 10 additional risk factors explored, the least significant
proved to be political instability (as measured by whether a country
had changed its level of democratization in the previous three years),
a country’s geography and its degree of ethnic diversity.

"It’s not that people of different ethnic backgrounds can’t get along
because they have different cultures or creeds," Min said. "It’s that
political exclusion along ethnic lines stirs up trouble."

With a 98-percent exclusion rate, Liberia between 1946 and 1980
had the highest rate of ethnic exclusion, followed by Rhodesia
(now Zimbabwe), with 97 percent between 1965 and 1979, and Nepal,
with 95 percent between 1946 and 1950.

"All but one of these countries did, in fact, see serious armed
conflict during these periods, and they are part of a pattern
that holds across cases, continents and time periods," Wimmer
said. "They are good examples of the causal forces that operate in
many less extreme cases of exclusion as well. You need to have a good
understanding of these general mechanisms if you want to design policy
that can be adapted to specific cases."

With a current exclusion rate of about 85 percent, Syria, Sudan and
Rwanda tied as the study’s most exclusionary countries today.

Since Sudan’s and Rwanda’s ethnic conflicts have been in the news for
years, their vulnerability did not surprise researchers, but Syria’s
situation defied their expectations.

"Syria hasn’t had a conflict since 1982, so it looks very stable
today, especially compared to its neighbors Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq,
but our general findings suggest that there are tensions that could
rise to the surface in the future," Wimmer said.

On the other hand, the researchers cautioned that their model did not
capture all the risk factors equally well. Pakistan’s relatively low
exclusion rate of 11 percent would bode well for the country’s future
prospects for peace.

"You might see civil war in that country for other reasons, but they
would be unrelated to ethnic exclusion," Cederman said.

As much as the findings point toward the benefits of eliminating
political marginalization of ethnic groups, they show that inclusion
alone is no panacea for peace. This became clear when the researchers
looked at the number of ethnic groups with representation in a
government. Increasing the number of ethnic elites that share power
also increased the risk of violence, the study found.

"Overall, more inclusion still lowers the risk of conflict, despite
the potential for violent infighting among power-sharing partners,"
Wimmer said.

Similarly, democratization is not necessarily a guarantee of
peace. Moving from autocracy to anocracy, the study found, might
well increase the likelihood of violent escalation of conflict,
because protest movements are no longer as effectively and ruthlessly
repressed as in a dictatorship.

"Once a democracy has become routinized, you can expect stability,
but that can take years, if not decades," Wimmer said. "The process
of democratization can stir up ethnic conflict."