Ethnic Groups in Conflict

For their empirical evaluation, several active research programs in economics and political science require data on ethnic groups across countries. “Ethnic group,” however, is a slippery concept. After addressing conceptual and practical obstacles, I present a list of 822 ethnic groups in 160 countries that made up at least 1 percent of the country population in the early 1990s. I compare a measure of ethnic fractionalization based on this list with the most commonly used measure. I also construct an index of cultural fractionalization that uses the structural distance between languages as a proxy for the cultural distance between groups in a country.

Ethnic and Cultural Diversity by Country

The “third wave of democratization” (Huntington 1991; Vanhanen 2000) has raised hopes for a more peaceful world. The thesis of the democratic peace suggests that the spread of democracy will promote a decline in interstate warfare (Doyle 1986; Russett 1993), at least once the unsettling effects of the transition period are overcome (Ward and Gleditsch 1998). But does democratization also lead to civil peace? Considerable research has examined how regime type or the level of democracy relates to domestic conflict. Much of it focuses on the result that semidemocracies (regimes intermediate between a democracy and an autocracy) exhibit a higher propensity for civil conflict than either extreme. Another strand of research focuses on how changes in regime lead to domestic conflict. This has implications for the former finding, since semidemocracies are more prone to regime change. Indeed, is the greater propensity for violence of intermediate regimes equivalent to the finding that states in political transition experience more violence? Are the results relating civil violence to level and change, in fact, one and the same finding? Or, are both explanations relevant? That is the key issue examined in this article. We link level of democracy and regime change in an empirical analysis that uses data from 152 countries in the period 1816 ‐1992. We also explore the implications of the direction and magnitude of political change. The statistical model we formulate overcomes some of the problems in research that is based on country-years, such as the fact that these do not constitute independent observations, as well as the possibility that the amount of civil war in the system of states fluctuates over time. Finally, our work adopts a multivariate framework with several control variables, among them socioeconomic and cultural factors, as well as spatial and temporal contagion. A separate analysis, with a more extensive set of control variables, is performed for the post‐World War II period.

/pdf/toward-a-democratic-civil-peace-democracy-political-change-21xpuv3uyy.pdf

Toward a Democratic Civil Peace? Democracy, Political Change, and Civil War, 1816-1992

This article reports and analyzes an updated version of the widely-used Polity II dataset, consisting of annual indicators of institutional democracy and autocracy for 161 states spanning the years from 1946 through 1994. The validity of the Polity III indicators of regime type is supported by their strong correlations (.85 to .92) with seven conceptually and operationally different indicators of democracy developed by other researchers. Comparative analysis of global and regional trends in democracy shows the extent to which the Middle East and Africa lag behind other world regions in the transition to democracy. A series of challenges to the `third wave' of democratization are identified, with particular attention paid to the large numbers of institutionally unconsolidated, or `incoherent', polities that have recently emerged, mainly due to attempts by autocratic elites to contain domestic and international pressures to liberalize their regimes.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/425616.pdf

Tracking Democracy's Third Wave with the Polity III Data

Human security is the latest in a long line of neologisms—including common security, global security, cooperative security, and comprehensive security—that encourage policymakers and scholars to think about international security as something more than the military defense of state interests and territory. Although deanitions of human security vary, most formulations emphasize the welfare of ordinary people. Among the most vocal promoters of human security are the governments of Canada and Norway, which have taken the lead in establishing a “human security network” of states and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that endorse the concept.1 The term has also begun to appear in academic works,2 and is the subject of new research projects at several major universities.3 Human Security Roland Paris

Human Security: Paradigm Shift or Hot Air?

Political protest and rebellion by communal groups has become a major impetus to domestic and international political change. This study uses new coded data on 227 communal groups throughout the world to assess a general model of how and why they mobilize to defend and promote their collective interests. Statistical analysis shows that cultural identity, inequalities, and historical loss of autonomy all contribute substantially to their grievances. Political mobilization, grievances, and the international diffusion and contagion of communal conflict jointly explain the extent of political action in the 1980s. Democracy, state power, and institutional change help determine whether conflict takes the form of protest or rebellion.

Ted Robert Gurr

Papers

Why Minorities Rebel: A Global Analysis of Communal Mobilization and Conflict since 1945: