Closer to the Source: Cultural Status Inequalities and Civil Wars

• In Event: Ethnic Inequality and Exclusion

Abstract

National identities are imbued with emotional potency. Yet, under which conditions these emotions compel minority groups toward violent behavior has been a contested topic amongst scholars. Whilst early quantitative research highlighted the importance of material incentives, there remains a need for more nuanced measures and a comprehensive understanding of the role of grievances in civil wars. Existing studies too frequently rely on country-level indicators with poor data validity – such as ethnolinguistic fractionalization (ELF) or Gini coefficient – to discard the role of grievances in civil wars. What is lacking is an exploration of the sources of grievances, i.e., the policies that discriminate against certain group characteristics. This study presents a novel global cross-national group-level dataset spanning 1945-2020, capturing information on the religious and linguistic policies of independent nation-states. By concentrating on government policies that may either fuel or dampen conflict, this research aspires to establish a theoretical link between discrimination and group conflict behavior, thereby advancing our understanding of civil wars.

Since the early 2000s, civil wars and societal conflict have been generally analyzed through the theoretical prism of greed or grievance. Early studies of civil war dismissed grievance-type arguments, saying grievances are too widespread to explain something rare like group conflict. These conclusions largely arise from employing empirical measures of inequality and grievances without robust theoretical justification. For example, the most prevalent proxies for grievances, such as ethnolinguistic fractionalization (ELF) or the Gini coefficient, depend on individualistic principles and are insensitive to other social cleavages or group structures.

Recognizing these shortcomings, recent studies have indicated that ethnic grievances—rooted in horizontal ethnic inequality and specific patterns of political and economic privilege and exclusion—may help explain the outbreak of ethnic civil wars (Cederman, Wimmer, and Min, 2010; Buhaug, Cederman, and Gleditsch, 2014). These studies have shifted the analytical focus from vertical inequalities between individuals to horizontal inequalities at the group level. Yet, these studies have almost exclusively focused on grievances that stem from a group’s horizontal economic or political inequality (Buhaug et al., 2014; Østby, 2008; Wimmer, 2002). Whereas, horizontal inequalities are multifaceted, including a cultural recognition dimension alongside socioeconomic and political dimensions (Langer and Stewart, 2014). Cultural status inequalities, defined as "differences in the treatment, public recognition or status of different groups' cultural norms, practices, symbols, and customs" have largely been absent from analyses of civil wars. As Horowitz (2002: 22) asserts cultural matters, “such as the designation of official languages and official religions, and educational issues, such as languages of instruction, the content of curricula, and the official recognition of degrees from various educational streams associated with various ethnic or religious groups” often play a central role in the emergence of violent conflicts.

In response the paper hypothesizes that an important link between culture and violent group mobilization is the extent to which cultural groups' practices and customs are differentially recognized in and by the state. Specifically, and following the grievance approach, we expect linguistic and religious discrimination to generate resentment among disadvantaged groups and increase the probability of (ethnic) civil war.

Data problems have so far prevented economic research into the effect of cultural status inequalities at the level of groups (Langer and Stewart, 2014). To overcome this problem, we draw on the Nation-Building Policies (NBP) Dataset, a novel global dataset that identifies distinct state policies across give major policy fields (mass education, citizenship, public identity expression, constitutional law, and state violence) targeted at socially and politically relevant groups in all countries since 1945. The NBP dataset is set up to map how nation-building policies vary across groups and time. For the purposes of this paper, we focus on the variables in our dataset that tap into cultural status inequalities between groups to generate a horizontal inequality measure that captures the relative discrepancy in cultural status privileges between the national average and the most marginalized group in society. Relevant variables include the recognition of religion(s), official and national language(s), policies towards vernacular education and religious schooling, bans or restrictions on naming, laws regulating language use in public space, constitutional recognition of groups, and instances of cultural genocide. By adequately operationalizing independent variables in the grievance-conflict nexus, we aim to make a new and meaningful contribution to this decades-long debate.

Authors

• Emre Amasyali, Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI)

• Matthias vom Hau, Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals