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Posts from the ‘Ethnicity’ Category

May 23

Comparative Xenophobia, Part III: The Quickening

By Steve Saideman

Over the past couple of days, Max Fisher has posted a few maps and some commentary about global comparisons of ethnic tolerance and diversity.  This led to as series of posts as I had more than a few thoughts about this stuff, which Fisher was kind enough to summarize back at his Washington Post blog.

I promised in my initial post to get to the relationship between economic freedom and tolerance that was a key issue raised in the first piece on tolerance. I got distracted by the second post, but now I can try to remember what I was thinking two days ago.

Fisher reports that the study he is analyzing finds that economic freedom has no correlation with racial tolerance, but does with tolerance of homosexuals. So, we have two separate findings — do they have a common logic? It depends on what one considers to be the sources of racism versus the sources of homophobia. Do all forms of discrimination and animus have the same logic? Maybe, maybe not.

Some caveats:

  • I am not an expert on homophobia, so I am going to have to speculate a bit. Yes, I should do a heap of reading, but my blog is not my day job.
  • The data on tolerance may be flaky, as my and Fisher’s various posts suggest.
  • The data on economic freedom is from institutes that are ideologically committed to less government. It does not mean that their data is necessarily wrong, but it is something to keep in mind.

The Fisher posts do not include a map of the Economic Freedom stuff, so here it is:

So a few comments on this data. Note that the US and the Scandinavian countries are in the same category. This tends to run against what libertarians generally think — as the social democracies of Europe tend to have much more government intervention in the economy. All I can say is that a map having Sweden and the US in the same category tells me that the economic freedom that is meant here is not that which tends to jibe with popular views of that concept.

Instead, with a few exceptions, this map looks a lot like first world vs. non-first world (Italy, Greece, Turkey, Chile, Saudi Arabia, Mongolia and Kazakhstan are on the wrong sides of this divide, more or less), which means that there is a whole going on in the data other than just economic freedom — that is, the correlations may be spurious. I am sure the article controls for some stuff (I cannot seem to get through via Carleton’s library this morning), but it may be the case that what this data really captures is developed democracies and everyone else. If this is the case, it could be that the other stuff associated with developed democracies matters more than the economic freedom in shaping tolerance towards homosexuals but not towards different races: greater secularism, greater women’s rights (more on that below), being rich, and so on. Again, I cannot say whether the authors of the study handle the other things in play well or not.

So, what do I think? First, my view of ethnic conflict, including racial conflict, tends to focus on the factors that ameliorate or exacerbate competition for political power, which then may affect how the distribution of economic growth, jobs, happiness, etc. In my own work with David Steinberg of U of Oregon, I have found that economic freedom (using a different data source) is associated with less ethnic conflict. Why? Because if the government is more deeply involved in the economy, groups will have greater incentives to gain control of the government — the stakes are larger. This competition and fear of what the government might do if group y over may cause group x to pre-empt. To be clear, this is just about ethnic violence, not intolerance. So, the study Fisher reports and the work I did with Dave suggests that intolerance and violence are not necessarily related since the same kind of variables (economic freedom indicators) are correlated with violence but not intolerance. What this says to me is that intolerance itself is all around us but is only politically relevant under particular circumstances, such as what the government is doing and who has access to the government. As far as I can remember, most of the Minorities at Risk findings tended to show that the various suites of discrimination variables tended not to be significantly related to ethnic violence.

Second, I am not sure what causes homophobia or tolerance of homosexuals, but I would guess that those places with more religiosity would be more homophobic. Sorry, but most of the major religions tend to be unfriendly towards homosexuals (gets to my basic view of religions as market maximizing entities, and homosexual is bad for procreation and thus market share). Western societies tend to be less religious, which might facilitate tolerance. Advanced democracy might have something to do with it as well, since equal protection under the law, something that is only now really being applied in the US, is a fundamental democratic concept. But it does seem to take a while to be applied so older democracies may be “getting it” now, while younger democracies are still focused on other elements of democracy: civilian control of the military (largely an afterthought in US, Canada, UK, Sweden, etc), free and fair elections (sort of), etc. Anyhow, if economic freedom is associated with tolerance of homosexuality, it is probably due to the stuff that causes economic freedom rather than the economic freedom itself doing the causal work.

Third, what this discussion really misses is the real key to human progress, which is not economic freedom but better conditions for women. Women doing better is associated with less civil war, more democracy, more economic growth, etc. All kinds of studies (which elude me this early morning) show that the more women are treated better/equally in the workplace, in government, and in the economy, the better off societies and countries are — less violence, etc. Of course, there may be other stuff going on as well, but this particular causal relationship is so appealing that I am not going to question it, especially as I have already written too many words on an early morning.

I am sure my readers can find plenty of work via scholar google that shows that the better off women are, the better off we all are. Right?

A version of this post was first published at Steve Saideman’s blog.

May 22

1 Comment

Comparative Xenophobia, Part II

By Steve Saideman

I had intended to address the relationship between economic freedom and tolerance Max Fisher touched on in his recent post on world racial tolerance, but the piece pushed a couple of buttons that require a quick reaction.

diverity-map-harvard

To be clear, I am a big fan of Max Fisher and his infographics. They make me think, and I could always use more of that. He is also quite judicious in his post, noting that diversity and conflict do not line up neatly. And he does deploy the key “money quote”:

In general, it does not matter for our purposes whether ethnic differences reflect physical attributes of groups (skin color, facial features) or long-lasting social conventions (language, marriage within the group, cultural norms) or simple social definition (self-identification, identification by outsiders).* When people persistently identify with a particular group, they form potential interest groups that can be manipulated by political leaders, who often choose to mobilize some coalition of ethnic groups (“us”) to the exclusion of others (“them”). Politicians also sometimes can mobilize support by singling out some groups for persecution, where hatred of the minority group is complementary to some policy the politician wishes to pursue.

* I do appreciate the idea that the kind of identity does not matter so much (my view of ethnicity includes religion as well as race, language, and kinship as potential shared attributes that tie the group), although one could argue that certain kinds of divides have somewhat different dynamics.

This is why in my ethnic conflict classes I show both the classic Star Trek episode (black/white vs white/black) and the Babylon 5 episode where ethnicity is randomly assigned (purple vs. green) via scarves pulled out of a box. Ethnicity is not primordial (sorry, Robert Kaplan), but constructed with social and political meaning attached but changes over time due to politics and context. The money paragraph that Fisher quotes basically sets up the puzzles of the contemporary study of ethnic conflict: when do people support politicians who use identity to divide and coordinate and when do they not? Not all appeals based on ethnicity work (David Duke, anyone?).

So, heaps of good stuff in this piece, especially the end. I just want to address the instances of conventional wisdom that are problematic. That is, they are my pet peeves.

  • Fisher cites the article discussing how Somalia’s identity politics changed after the civil war in 1991. This would be fine, except that Somalia has always been poorly understood. People often think that Somalia could be the one African country that could support secession and even be irredentist (seeking to annex neighboring territory inhabited by kin) because of its homogeneity (unless they have read my stuff). Somalis speak the same language, are all Muslim, are of the same race, and so on. But they were always divided by clan identity (kinship), which meant that the irredentism was always inconsistent. The leaders in Mogadishu would support the claims of some of the kin in some of the neighboring countries, depending on whether the kin had ties to politically relevant kin in Somalia. So, lots of irredentism targeting Somalis in Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti occurred in the early 1960s because then the electoral system required playing to a wider audience. In the mid to late 1970s, however, the irredentism only focused on the Ogaden clan residing in Ethiopia because its kin was a key partner in the authoritarian regime, while the clans tied to the Somalis in Kenya and Djibouti were not in the regime.
    • Fisher and the folks he is citing are probably correct in that the focus since 1991 has probably moved to sub-clan identities. It is still kinship, but with smaller fractions so you get fighting between different sub-clans that belong to the same clan or clan-family rather than competition between clans or clan-families.
  •  Fisher does a great job of explaining ethnic fractionalization indexes. I wish I could communicate that concept as well. The problem with fractionalization is that it has been used poorly in the study of ethnic conflict and civil war. Two of the most productive and respected scholars in the field, Jim Fearon and David Laitin, wrote a very influential piece on civil war (3,500 citations!), and most of it is quite good. But when they seek to test whether ethnicity matters in the onset of violence, they use ethnic fractionalization as their indicator of whether ethnicity is relevant. They find it is not. The problem with this is there is very little work in the field on whether more diversity causes more conflict. What is the logic? Yes, one has to have more than one ethnicity to have ethnic conflict (not much ethnic conflict in South Korea), but beyond that? Not so clear.
    • Tanzania is among the most diverse countries in the world with over a hundred different groups, but has had very little conflict. Why? Well, in part, no one group is big enough perhaps to dominate the rest? (I am guessing a bit here since my knowledge of Tanzania is thin).
    • What might be related to ethnic conflict and civil war is the square of ethnic fractionalization. That is, in societies with very little diversity there is no opportunity for violence. For societies where this is a great deal, there is no threat of dominance. But in places where there are a few groups that rival each other, then the threats they pose to each other, or at least one to the others, can be severe. Ethnic violence may not be about fractionalization/diversity but about polarization.
    • The one consistent finding for ethnic conflict is not about fractionalization but about group concentration. That where ethnic groups have distinct areas apart from each other within a country, there is more conflict. Why? Well, partly because it facilitates separatism. Partly because groups that are separate have a secure base from which to launch attacks. Partly because intermingled groups may be deterred from attacking since they themselves are vulnerable (kind of like mutual assured destruction).

I look forward to more maps and other graphics at the Washington Post. They get my juices flowing on this stuff, when I have been focusing elsewhere the past several years.

And I will get to the economic freedom/tolerance stuff tomorrow.

A version of this piece was first posted at Steve Saideman’s blog.

May 16

8 Comments

Comparative Xenophobia, Part I

By Steve Saideman

Yesterday, the Washington Post put up this map based on World Values data and other information:

racism-map3

The variable shown is “share that answered ‘people of another race’ when asked to pick from groups of people they would not want as neighbors.” This makes it appear that India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Nigeria are the most racist countries. The article mentions a heap of appropriate caveats. Mine is this: I could not find this question in the dataset quickly as the dataset is vast.* Heaps and heaps of variables. So, I am going to be guessing a bit here, but as a xenophobia kind of guy, I have a few thoughts:

  • The first thing is that the question is not so much whether people are more or less tolerant of different races but that among the various factors that might shape one’s intolerance towards neighbors, race is the most cited. It may be that a place is very racist, but is even more homophobic or sectarian or whatever. There are many ways to hate or to target intolerance, so it may just be that a particularly hateful place is just somewhat more intolerant of groups who are distinct by a cleavage other than race.
  • Second, in some places, when one is asked this question, they may think of a single race; perhaps the Vietnamese think of the Chinese but not of other races. So, it may not be that the people are very racist in general — they just hate one group that is defined by race.
  • Third, living nearby is a moderate test of the question of tolerance. Can you work with group x? Can be friends? Can have in the family? Oh, yes, that is a tougher test of tolerance. Check out the figure of a series of questions asked of Romanians:

graphic_racism

What this illustrates is there are varying degrees of tolerance. And I wonder from looking at the WashPo infographic whether we would have seen very different results if the question had been friends/family rather than live nearby. Still, given that the US did well on this despite much segregation, perhaps this question is a suitable test.

The larger point is that hate is a many, uh, splendored thing. Ok, not so splendored. But it is complex, so we cannot just look at it and say that Indians are the most racist folks. Race, as we have been reminded in the past week thanks to a particularly problematic dissertation, is a very fuzzy thing. So the WashPo graphic is interesting and provocative but not conclusive.

I will consider the second part of the article, the relationship between economic freedom and various kinds of tolerance, later (today or tomorrow).

* Max Fisher, who wrote the WashPo piece responded to my tweets with more info about the data, so I may explore it further later today or tomorrow, depending on if I need to be distracted from the stuff that has actual deadlines. Yet more proof that Twitter rocks, as I would never have called up Fisher nor would have he have responded this quickly to a semi-random question.

Cross-posted at Steve Saideman’s personal blog.

Apr 10

2 Comments

Researching While Black: Why Conflict Research Needs More African Americans (Maybe)

By Christian Davenport

Popular Science Monthly Volume 50, 1896, via Wikimedia.

Popular Science Monthly Volume 50, 1896, via Wikimedia.

I had just flown into Rwanda around 2001/2 when someone came up to me and asked if I was from the United States. I was wearing a Yankees cap — which I thought might have given me away, though I had seen several already — but what had actually drawn this person’s attention was a KRS-One reference they’d overheard. Shortly after, I was asked into one of the hundreds of hair saloons that littered the streets of Rwanda, much like the streets of Harlem back when it was black. I was not sure where this was going but was willing to go along for the ride, so to speak.

Once in the saloon I was asked a whole array of questions: what was America like in general as well as for blacks especially? What was New York, hip-hop like? And what did I think of their saloon, which looked something like a rap museum with old covers of Source magazine lining the walls alongside bizarre pictures of the most obscure artists, and some song from ’80s-vintage group Houdini playing the background. Over the next few weeks I spent time at the saloon, and could tell that some of the people there seemed to be opening up to me (all were young Hutus, the predominate ethnic group once in charge of the country before the minority Tutsis took over). They lingered longer and longer on my questions about what life was like now, and how things differed from the way they were before “the war.”

While I never really thought about it until years later, being an African American was my way in. In 1999-2000 when I first started going to the country America was not on the most popular countries list. In Rwandan’s minds America had abandoned them, and they — willing to trash the US in a second — looked for anyone to ready chime in on the topic. As any African American who has listened to Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Public Enemy, and NWA could, I was more than ready to “go negative”. My additional readings of W.E.B. Dubois, Marcus Garvey, Ralph Bunche and Imari Obadele also lent themselves to a critique of America.
Being hostile to America or Americans is one of the things that blacks are not only good at but are also seemingly “known for” — like basketball and singing perhaps. I found this tendency interesting because Rwandans seemed to assume that I was ready to criticize America. Normally it takes a few meetings, a meal or two, or a long trip for someone to get this out of me. What was fascinating was that the preconceived notion about what I, as an African American, would think and do seemed to ease all my subsequent communication with Rwandans. This access wasn’t limited to the bottom of Rwandan society (i.e., the slightly demoralized, defeated Hutu male youth) but also those on the top (i.e., the largely empowered, victorious Tutsi male youth). Indeed, if I was willing to “Malcolm” a little it seemed to increase individuals’ desires to not only speak with me, but to connect me with others in their network.

Now, I did not find performing some element of blackness offensive (i.e., putting on a little show for an audience interesting in digesting something from the g-h-e-t-t-o). I always have a little “Malcolm” in me, and a little “Martin” too, as I will discuss below. For one, this was nothing compared to being asked to perform “blackness” for white educators at Northfield Mt. Hermon School, who would ask “Christian do you have anything on the topic?” after Huck Finn drew the question “I wonder how the black man felt…” from Mr. Block. Or, when I was asked to strut for a part in some Shakespearean play at NMH “like I did around campus”. That was far worse, and it did not lead to unique datasets or decent publications.

Read more

Jul 26

4 Comments

Ethnic Conflict via Science Fiction

By Stephen Saideman

Since Joseph Young has addressed the use of science fiction for examining political violence, I thought I would use two bits of sci-fi to illustrate some evolution in our thinking about ethnic conflict: Star Trek and Babylon 5.

In a very classic episode of Star Trek, “Let That Be Your Final Battlefield,” the Enterprise encounters a fugitive and his pursuer. One’s body is black on the left side and white on the right side. The other’s is the opposite—and the two hate each other. So, the episode’s first point is that a small ethnic marker can produce hate that is neither fathomable nor flexible. These two aliens hate each other, and are willing to burn down everything around them in order to kill the other. As a result of this hatred, when the two return to their home planet they find it devastated.

The important aspect for scholars of international relations is the role played by the Enterprise crew—as bystanders. The two aliens so hate each other that there is nothing than an outsider can do, despite their best efforts and best intentions. The implication for us: ancient hatreds means outsiders can do nothing. Perhaps Bill Clinton did not need Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts on his bedside table to be reluctant to intervene in Bosnia—all he had to do was remember the classic Star Trek episode.

In the 1990s, a new sci-fi show focusing on a UN-esque space station, Babylon 5, also tackled the problem of ethnic conflict. In the episode “Geometry of Shadows,” one subplot, played mostly for laughs focused on one of the groups of aliens, the Drazi, that were mostly in the background during the series. But in this one episode, conflict breaks out among the Drazi. As the crew of the station investigated, they realized that there were two groups fighting each other. Every so often, their entire society fights. This ritual begins by members of the society randomly picking from a box a green or purple scarf. Once one has a green scarf, all greens become allies and all purples become adversaries. And then they fight. Once the fight is over, the winner gets to unify Drazi society.

This notion of identity is very distinct from Star Trek’s and much more akin to what many scholars have been arguing—that identity is constructed, that the content may not matter so much, but that social identity theory tells us that minor differences can create significant cleavages. In an era where Milosevic moved quickly from Communist to nationalist, this view of identity made a great deal of sense. This view also has implications for international relations—that one can intervene quite easily since identity is really thin and flexible. In the show, one of the station’s crew steals the scarf of one of the leaders and then is the leader of one of the factions, making it much easier to come to a settlement.

The reality, of course, is that ethnic identity is neither as fixed as Star Trek suggests nor as fluid as Babylon 5 asserts. Likewise, intervention is neither impossible nor easy. Outsiders can play a role as others have discussed in previous posts here, but intervention is neither certain nor always successful.

I am just curious about the next generation of science fiction to see if the fictional view of identity continues to evolve and whether it matches how scholars of ethnic conflict think about identity. All I know is that as long as I continue to teach about the IR of Ethnic Conflict, I will continue to show these two episodes to illustrate how we think about ethnic conflict and its implications for intervention.

Jul 18

6 Comments

Hate Crimes In The USA

By Will H. Moore

Through the first six months of 2012 the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has recorded 247 hate crime incidents reported by news media in the United States.* If that rate holds steady for the rest of the year it will represent a 56% increase over the 316 incidents that it cataloged in 2012 2011. Of course, 2012 is a presidential election year, and we would thus anticipate a substantial uptick in such events (throughout the world elections are positively associated with increased violence; e.g., see Richards & Gelleny; Rapoport & Weinberg; and Chenoweth). In 2008 the SPLC recorded 501 incidents, so 2012 is shaping up to look almost precisely like the last year in which we had a presidential election in the US.

The map above depicts the number of known active hate groups in each state in the US. Clicking on it will take you to the SPLC website where you can drill down to the specific locations of various groups. While the map does not depict change over time, it turns out that there has been a considerable increase in the number of hate groups in the US. In their March, 2012 report “As Election Season Heats Up, Hate Groups at Record Levels” the SPLC writes:

The American radical right grew explosively in 2011, a third consecutive year of extraordinary growth that has swelled the ranks of extremist groups to record levels… “The dramatic expansion of the radical right is the result of our country’s changing racial demographics, the increased pace of globalization, and our economic woes”

We observe similar trends in Europe (e.g., see p. 432 of the May 8, 2009 issue of CQ Researcher, which is of general interest).

In an unpublished 2009 study Richard Fording and John Cotter examine the increase in white supremacy groups by studying both individual and county level data. They conclude that:

The election of blacks has likely fueled an increase in group consciousness among the most prejudiced whites, thus contributing to a proliferation of hate groups across the country.

In sociology the idea that an increase in power and status among subordinate groups generates a backlash among some members of privileged groups is known as the threat hypothesis. A “defensive mobilization” (aka conservative mobilization) literature has grown up around the threat hypothesis, and the Fording & Cotter finding is but one of many that support the theory that as the superordinate power/privilege/status of white Americans continues to decline toward equality a small percentage, but large number, of whites will band together and form groups that attempt to defend the status quo (or, more properly, a romanticized ideal of a status quo ante). More specifically, those at greatest risk to defensive mobilization are those whose earning potential is eroded by the reduction of discrimination in labor markets.  Economic recession compounds mechanization processes that replace unskilled laborers with machines, and there is a well documented tendency for threatened groups of white unskilled laborers to respond with violence against minority groups (e.g., Olzak; McVeigh). So the rise in both hate groups and incidents that the SPLC documents is not surprising, and academic research strongly supports the  explanation they provided in their March report.

What might we expect over the coming decades? Because “the non-Hispanic white share of the U.S. total population will likely fall below 50 percent by 2050,” in 2011 the Kennan Institute identified the browning of America as the second of its six most disruptive demographic trends. I, for one, have been surprised at the limited violent challenges to the American political system by white supremacy groups. For over a decade I have held the opinion that as its privilege declines white America has one last mobilization/rebellion cycle in it before ceding its numeric advantage. Economic recession, shrinking unskilled jobs, and an election year substantially increase the likelihood of this occuring, but thus far activities have been limited to small groups that engage in actions with low levels of violence. We’ll see what the rest of the summer and fall bring.

* The SPLC provides the following note about their hate crime incident data: “Incidents of apparent hate crimes and hate group activities listed here are drawn primarily from media sources. These incidents include only a fraction of the approximately 191,000 reported and unreported hate crimes that a 2005 government report estimated occur annually.”

@WilHMoo

Jun 22

Ethnic Groups Are Not states

By Lise Morjé Howard

Ethnic groups are not states. This simple fact seems to elude many journalists and, on occasion, scholars. But my aim in this post are journalists and in particular the June 5, 2012 New York Times story about the controversy over the Askariya Shrine in Samarra, Iraq, “Violence Spreads in Struggle for Shrine” by Tim Arango and Yasir Ghazi. In the story, the reporters depict the conflict as “a dispute escalat[ing] between Sunnis and Shiites.” It discusses Sunnis and Shiites as if they are distinct, bounded, groups fighting one another because of past grievances. The journalists don’t question this “groupist” position in their own reporting. They do, however, offer two quotations from Iraqis that directly contradict the groupist ontological understanding of ethnicity.  One Iraqi asks, “what did the victims of today do to be killed?  Sectarianism has no mercy against anyone, and there are groups of criminals and militias used by officials and politicians to achieve their specific agenda.” Another says, “They are not fighting for the shrines; they are fighting for the money that these shrines can bring to them. It’s just another way to play with people’s emotions to gain advantage.” Both of these quotations offer a Rogers Brubaker-type approach to understanding ethnicity and conflict: conflict is waged between leaders and their organizations who manipulate ethnic identity for narrow gain. Violent conflict does not occur between bounded, whole, discrete ethnic groups for the very reason that ethnic groups are not bounded, discrete wholes. Ethnic “groups” are messy, dissimilar units. They are not like states because they don’t have features such as clear, internationally-demarcated borders or legitimate domestic legal systems. Members of different ethnic categories blend together, cross borders, and interests can be extremely heterogeneous. Some ethnic groups have clearer boundaries than others. Ethnic groups do not fight one another in similar ways that states do, because ethnic groups are not like states. We err when we treat ethnic groups as distinct wholes—scholars and journalists alike have much to learn from those Iraqis quoted in the article.

Jun 19

3 Comments

Explaining Communal Violence in Myanmar

By Kristine Eck

Sittwe, capital of Rakhine state, Myanmar. Photo by Joakim Kreutz.

The past week witnessed the outbreak of communal violence between the Muslim Rohingya and the Buddhist Rakhine in Myanmar’s Rakhine State which led to the deaths of at least 35 people. Communal violence between these groups is not new. This violence is particularly problematic because it runs counter to the good news stories otherwise coming out of Burma (the holding of free by-elections, Aung San Suu Kyi’s participation in governance, ongoing peace negotiations, the suspension of sanctions, and a foreign investment frenzy).

Internal data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) indicate that episodes of violence have flared up at least four times in the past 20 years. Is this violence different from previous years’ and how do we explain it? The UCDP data suggest that last week’s episode led to more fatalities than similar clashes in the past. One possible explanation for the higher levels of fatalities is that the media, and social media like Facebook, are inflaming the situation by facilitating the spread of rumors and hate speech. While research has found that rumors are an essential component of violent dynamics in riots, this is not likely to explain the escalation of violence in Rakhine state for the simple reason that internet access is poor across the state, limiting the population’s exposure to it. Internet hatemongering may, however, effect the likelihood that anti-Muslim communal violence spreads to other parts of the country, which themselves also have histories of communal violence.

I’m inclined to relate the intensity of the current violence in part to the response of the Myanmar state. While previous governments have been complicit in encouraging communal tensions, the outbreak of communal violence was suppressed through heavy-handed repression: mass arrests, curfews, and the imposition of army troops. While the current government has deployed troops to the area, it has struggled to use them for policing without resorting to the types of human rights violations it engaged in under previous regimes. With the current moves towards a democratic transition, the state is more constrained in its use of coercive force. In a working paper with Joakim Kreutz, we find that regime transitions function as a window of opportunity for communal leaders to exploit the decreased deterrent capacity of the state. In such periods, the state is less able to contain the problems of communal opportunism that are otherwise restricted by the threat of punishment from formal institutions or in-group policing structures. We suggest that this problem will be particularly acute for regimes transitioning away from autocracy; when excessive force is the norm, anything less is seen as a signal of institutional weakness. Other research on communal violence between Muslims and Hindus in neighboring India support the idea that state incentives to punish perpetrators is essential to understanding the intensity of communal violence.

In addition to Myanmar’s existing armed ethnic conflicts, we can expect that the process of democratization will lead to further outbreaks of violence involving minority populations like the Muslims, Chinese, and other ethnic groups which constitute minorities within their states. These groups all lack political representation and coupled with the current scramble to stake out political and economic claims, the situation in Myanmar holds the potential for new outbreaks of violence.

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