Conflicts rooted in socio-cultural animosities: a historical analysis

Abstract

The paper studies the causes of domestic conflicts based on a project of the University of Illinois (Social, Political, Economic Event Database, SPEED), which leverages six decades of journalist output (1945-2005). It contains 62,141 newsworthy disruptive events worldwide and distinguishes between events rooted in class-based conflicts and anti-government sentiment, e.g., in addition to those rooted in socio-cultural animosities (SCA). We explored the dataset to assess the impact of communal identities as compared to other cleavages that unavoidably emerge in all societies. Analyses show that only a small proportion of ethnocultural differences leads to violent conflicts and that they typically act in conjunction with other causes. ‘Communal’ events are neither the most frequent nor the most violent and are unrelated to the countries’ fractionalization indexes. They are more convincingly related to movements for political rights, and motivated by social injustices. There was no evidence of a tendency for SCA-rooted events to escalate. However, the occurrence and intensity of SCA events do not vanish at higher levels of development and democracy. Developed democratic countries have managed to subdue actions rooted, for instance, in desires to (unconstitutionally/illegally) retain power, but setting and maintaining standards of communal coexistence is still a work in progress.

Keywords

• Domestic conflict
• ethnic/communal conflict
• socio-cultural animosities
• conflict types
• disruptive events
• conflict and democracy