From Claims to Violence: Signaling, Outbidding, and Escalation in Ethnic Conflict.

Manuel Vogt,Kristian Skrede Gleditsch,Lars-Erik Cederman

doi:10.1177/0022002721996436

Abstract

Do radical political demands increase the risk of ethnic civil conflict? And why do ethnic movements make radical demands in the first place? We contend that when movements are fragmented, individual organizations use far-reaching claims relative to the status quo to attract attention from the government, boost intra-organizational discipline, and outbid rivals. Yet, such radical claims also increase the risk of conflict escalation. We test our arguments at both the ethnic group and organizational levels, using a new dataset on ethno-political organizations and their political demands. Our results show that the scope of demands increases the more organizations exist within an ethnic movement and that radical demands increase the risk of civil conflict onset. This effect is specific to the dyadic government-movement interaction, irrespective of other ethnic groups in the country. Moreover, at the organizational level, radicalization in demands increases the likelihood that an organization becomes engaged in civil conflict.

Highlights

In October 2017, the latent conflict between the Cameroonian government and Anglophone opposition groups escalated into deadly violence, causing hundreds of fatalities
Do radical political demands increase the risk of ethnic civil conflict? And why do ethnic movements make radical demands in the first place? Recent research highlights the impact of actor fragmentation (Cunningham 2013) and organizational rivalries (Cunningham, Bakke, and Seymour 2012; Krause 2014; Pearlman 2008/09) on conflict dynamics, but has not analyzed in depth how radicalization in opposition demands intervenes in these processes
We introduce a new dataset on ethno-political organizations, EPR-Organizations (EPR-O), which covers a random sample of forty countries over the period 1946 to 2013 and identifies individual organizations representing groups in the Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) dataset (Cederman, Wimmer, and Min 2010; Vogt et al 2015), as well as their distinct claims

Summary

Introduction

In October 2017, the latent conflict between the Cameroonian government and Anglophone opposition groups escalated into deadly violence, causing hundreds of fatalities. We use the maximum organizational value among all organizations representing an ethnic group in a given year as our movement-level indicator of the scope of demands.

Results

Conclusion