How Conflicts become Ethnic: A New Conceptual and Methodological Framework

• In Event: Religion and Political Behavior in Arab Countries

Abstract

Ethnic conflicts are often seen as especially violent and intractable. But how and why do some conflicts become ``ethnic''? We develop a new conceptual and methodological framework for studying the ethnicization of conflict. Drawing on constructivist perspectives on ethnic identity formation and change, we conceptualize ethnicization as a framing process in which ethnic, frames, narratives, and interpretations of conflict come to dominate competing frames. Leveraging social media data and machine learning methods, we develop the first truly dynamic, temporally granular measure of the shifting salience of ethnic and non-ethnic identities during conflict. Applying this framework to the Syrian civil war, we empirically demonstrate the ethnicization of the Syrian conflict between 2011 and 2013 and conduct network and spatial analysis to identify the key drivers of this process. We also document important variation in ethnicization across conflicts, quantitatively illustrating lower levels of ethnicization in Yemen and shifting waves of ethnicization and de-ethnicization in Iraq. By integrating constructivist perspectives on ethnic identity into the quantitative literature on political conflict and violence, and providing a scalable and widely applicable approach to measuring ethnicization, this work provides a valuable contribution to the study of contemporary ethnic politics.

Authors

• Alexandra Arons Siegel, University of Colorado Boulder

• Yael Zeira, Syracuse University