Ethnic Politics and Armed Conflict: A Configurational Analysis of a New Global Data Set

2009/04/01 by Andreas Wimmer, Lars-Erik Cederman, Lars‐Erik Cederman +1 · 1,054 citations
Social Sciences · #Culture, Economy, and Development Studies #Demography #Development economics #Economics #Ethnic conflict #Ethnic group #Law #Multinomial logistic regression #Political Conflict and Governance #Political economy #Political science #Politics #Population #Power (physics) #Scholarship #Secession #Sociology #Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence

paper · doi:10.1177/000312240907400208

published in American Sociological Review 74(2), 316-337 (SAGE Publishing)

openalex publication_date 2009/04/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31

Abstract

Quantitative scholarship on civil wars has long debated whether ethnic diversity breeds armed conflict. We go beyond this debate and show that highly diverse societies are not more conflict prone. Rather, states characterized by certain ethnopolitical configurations of power are more likely to experience violent conflict. First, armed rebellions are more likely to challenge states that exclude large portions of the population on the basis of ethnic background. Second, when a large number of competing elites share power in a segmented state, the risk of violent infighting increases. Third, incohesive states with a short history of direct rule are more likely to experience secessionist conflicts. We test these hypotheses for all independent states since 1945 using the new Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) data set. Cross-national analysis demonstrates that ethnic politics is as powerful and robust in predicting civil wars as is a country's level of economic development. Using multinomial logit regression, we show that rebellion, infighting, and secession result from high degrees of exclusion, segmentation, and incohesion, respectively. More diverse states, on the other hand, are not more likely to suffer from violent conflict.

Citations

• Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War

Cited by

• Electoral Preferences Among Multiethnic Voters in Africa
• Ethnic outbidding and nested competition: Explaining the extremism of ethnonational minority parties in Europe
• PRIO-GRID: A unified spatial data structure
• Do the robot
• Ethnicity and Conflict: The Northern Ireland Troubles
• Finding a Peace that Lasts
• Horizontal Inequality, Crosscutting Cleavages, and Civil War
• The Ethnic Army and the State
• Provoking Ordinary People: The Effects of Terrorism on Civilian Violence
• Perceived inequality and variability in the expression of parochial altruism
• Why Do Ethnic Groups Rebel? New Data and Analysis
• Ideology and Revolution in Civil Wars: The “Marxist Paradox”
• The Uncertainty of Forced Displacement: How Language and Violence Shaped Displacement Trajectories During Russia's Invasion of Ukraine
• Unconditional Loyalty: The Survival of Minority Autocracies
• Fabricating Communists: The Imagined Third That Reinvented the National Fault Line in Mid-Twentieth-Century Colombia’s Civil War
• The onset of civil armed conflicts and personalization of power in dictatorships
• The Enemy Within: Personal Rule, Coups, and Civil War in Africa
• The Ethnic Stacking in Africa Dataset: When leaders use ascriptive identity to build military loyalty
• Elite strategy in resilient authoritarianism: Equatorial Guinea, 1979–2023
• Religious Minorities at Risk
• Fuel to the Fire: Natural Disasters and the Duration of Civil Conflict
• The Institutional Origins of Ethnic Violence
• Is Diversity Detrimental? Ethnic Fractionalization, Public Goods Provision, and the Historical Legacies of Stateness
• How Does Ethnic Rebellion Start?
• Elections and Ethnic Civil War
• Patterns of Violence Directed against Civilians in Small Ethnic Enclaves during War in Iraq (2003–2009)
• Polygyny or Misogyny? Reexamining the “First Law of Intergroup Conflict”
• Inequality, Grievances, and Civil War
• Dominant Party Rule, Elections, and Cabinet Instability in African Autocracies
• Youth bulge and civil war: Why a country’s share of young adults explains only non-ethnic wars
• The Diverse Effects of Diversity on Democracy
• How Insurgency Begins
• Ethnicity and strategy in the Bosnian civil war
• Multiculturalism [wikipedia]
• The economics of secession: a review of legal, theoretical, and empirical aspects. [europepmc]
• Inequality between identity groups and social unrest. [europepmc]
• Ethnic inequality and forced displacement. [europepmc]
• When conflict meets political exclusion: Ethnicity, governance, and child mortality. [europepmc]
• Geopolitics and Political Geography in Russia: Global Context and National Characteristics [europepmc]

Related

• Why Do Ethnic Groups Rebel? New Data and Analysis
• Elections and Ethnic Civil War
• Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War
• Horizontal Inequality, Crosscutting Cleavages, and Civil War
• Ethnicity, Political Systems, and Civil Wars