How ethnic structure affects civil conflict
New article by Alexander Kustov (LCSR Associate Researcher) titled "How ethnic structure affects civil conflict: A model of endogenous grievance" was published in Conflict Management and Peace Science.
New article by Alexander Kustov (LCSR Associate Researcher) titled "How ethnic structure affects civil conflict: A model of endogenous grievance" was published in Conflict Management and Peace Science, November issue.
The main question of the article is “Does ethnic structure affect the occurrence of civil conflict and, if so, how?” The study develops an agent-based model of endogenous grievances that builds on the new constructivist conceptualization of ethnicity and the theories of group inequality and crosscuttingness. Specifically, the author simulates conflict as a function of spontaneous economic disparities between nominal “ethnic groups” with no predefined salient categories and related antagonism. Then he applies the model to reconsider the effect of (bidimensional) ethnic structure on conflict, which has been largely dismissed in recent scholarship. By varying the parameters of ethnic demography in artificial societies, he conducts a series of replicable experiments revealing that various structural settings yield systematically different patterns of conflict. While there is no “most hazardous” structure per se, both polarization and crosscuttingness appear to decrease the likelihood of violence but increase its potential deadliness, which indicates a more general tradeoff of conflict incidence and intensity.
The article can be found via the link bellow: