The Political Ramifications of Violence

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

A growing body of research focuses on the impact of war and violent conflict on politics at multiple levels of analysis. This panel contributes to this research program with a set of papers that collectively address the impact of violence on the attitudes and behaviors of individuals and communities in post-war and conflict-affected countries in diverse global regions. Focusing on the cross-time effect of violence, Lupu and Peisakhin interrogate how legacies of violence shape the political identities of victims and their descendants. Based on surveys in Crimea, Cambodia, and Guatemala, they show how wartime ethnic targeting can create narratives about outgroup hostility that persist over generations. Balcells, Pellegrino and Simonson raise novel questions about the ramifications of violence in geographically disparate locations. They argue that people in contexts with a recent history of conflict react to information about fighting in other countries by drawing connections with their own experience of conflict. Their core hypothesis holds that the resultant narratives increase hostility toward local outgroups, enhanced ingroup affinities, and, possibly, new motivations for conflict. Their analyses rely on data from original surveys in Bosnia and Serbia, where treated respondents were asked to write about their views of the Russia-Ukraine war. Cammett, Kapidzic, and Troy explicitly situate the study of individual post-war attitudes and behaviors in a larger context, focusing on variation in social relations across subnational units within Bosnia. To understand why people on average in some municipalities exhibit more conciliatory intergroup relations after war, they test the impact of the behavior of political elites and on distinct local social norms in driving positive shifts in attitudes and behaviors towards outgroup members. Their data are derived from a survey experiment of individuals in selected municipalities and a municipal-level data in 30 municipalities in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Finally, Daly studies how localized conflicts – in this case, between criminal groups and between these groups and the state – arise and become entrenched and then shape electoral outcomes. Based on qualitative and quantitative data from Mexico, she argues that, when the distribution of power between criminal organizations is disrupted, intergroup violence can ensue. In turn, voters in high violence areas often demand hardline security policies which can lead to conflict between states and criminal groups. Collectively, the papers on the proposed panel rely on innovative and original methods and data to advance debates about the political and social ramifications of violence across time and space.

Sub Unit

• Division 11: Comparative Politics

Individual Presentations

• Children of Violence: Victims in the Shadow of Conflict - Noam Lupu, Vanderbilt University; Leonid Peisakhin, New York University - Abu Dhabi

• Foreign Fights, Familiar Foes: How Distant Wars Shape Local Tensions - Laia Balcells, Georgetown University; Ana Paula Pellegrino, Georgetown University

• Local Variation in Intergroup Relations after Violence - Melani Cammett, Harvard University; Kevin Troy, Harvard University

• Criminal War and Peace - Sarah Zukerman Daly, Columbia University

Chair

• Arturas Rozenas New York University

Discussant

• Anil Menon University of Michigan