Author: dhchoi

Most wars are now civil wars. Even though international wars attract enormous global attention, they have become infrequent and brief. Civil wars usually attract less attention, but they have become increasingly common and typically go on for years. This report argues that civil war is now an important issue for development. War retards development, but conversely, development retards war. This double causation gives rise to virtuous and vicious circles. Where development succeeds, countries become progressively safer from violent conflict, making subsequent development easier. Where development fails, countries are at high risk of becoming caught in a conflict trap in which war wrecks the economy and increases the risk of further war. The global incidence of civil war is high because the international community has done little to avert it. Inertia is rooted in two beliefs: that we can safely ‘let them fight it out among themselves’ and that ‘nothing can be done’ because civil war is driven by ancestral ethnic and religious hatreds. The purpose of this report is to challenge these beliefs.

Authors: Nicholas Sambanis, Paul Collier, Lani Elliott, Håvard Hegre, Anke Hoeffler, and Marta Reynal-Querol

This article studies the conditions that lead peripheral minorities to identify with the state, their ethnic group, or neighboring countries. We contribute to research on separatism and irredentism by examining how violence, psychological distance, and national status determine identification. The analysis uses data from a novel experiment that randomized videos of actual violence in a large, representative survey of the Kashmir Valley region in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, an enduring site of separatist and irredentist conflict. We find that a strong regional identity is a counter-weight to irredentism, but violent repression by the state can push members of the minority to identify with an irredentist neighbor. Violence increases perceived distance from the nation and reduces national identification. There is suggestive evidence that these effects are concentrated among individuals with attributes that otherwise predict higher levels of identification with the state. An increase in national status brought about by economic growth and information about integrative institutions are insufficient to induce national identification in a context where psychological distance from the nation is large.

Authors: Gautam Nair (Yale) and Nicholas Sambanis (Penn)

The European debt crisis gave rise to policies of fiscal austerity designed to instill discipline and return economies to growth after a short-lived period of structural adjustment.  Greece received several bailouts conditional on implementing severe spending cuts and structural reforms.  These policies –many of them poorly implemented—led to a prolonged period of recession. While the economic effects of austerity policies and the political causes of the crisis have been studied extensively, less is known about their social impact.  We explore the effects of the crisis on pro-sociality using new household-level survey data and quasi-behavioral evidence from Greece.  We focus on the effects of joblessness, the most severe outcome of the economic downturn. We find a strong relationship between job loss and decreased generalized solidarity.  We find evidence of ingroup bias in charitable giving; the bias is more pronounced among individuals with greater exposure to the consequences of austerity policies. However, this bias is only weakly mediated by beliefs that foreigners are to blame for the economic crisis.

Authors: Nicholas Sambanis (Penn), Anna Schultz (Penn),  and Elena Nikolova (University College London)

Are existing models of civil war onset specific enough to explain why some conflicts turn into wars while others stay nonviolent? While it is often assumed that violent and nonviolent conflicts are qualitatively different and have different causes, that assumption is rarely tested empirically. We explore this question with reference to conflicts over self-determination. Using new data, we investigate the role of ethnic grievances in why nonviolent separatist conflicts emerge and why some of them subsequently escalate to violence. We find evidence that political exclusion and lost autonomy—two grievance factors commonly associated with ethnic war—are associated with the onset of nonviolent separatist claims, but that both factors also help to explain why nonviolent conflicts escalate to violence. Our results sup-port grievance-based explanations of ethnic war and highlight the need to focus on processes of conflict escalation to improve the specificity of models of civil war onset.

Authors: Micha Germann (University of Bath) and Nicholas Sambanis (Penn)

Ingroup bias and outgroup prejudice are pervasive features of human behavior, motivating various forms of discrimination and conflict. In an era of increased cross-border migration, these innate tendencies exacerbate inter-group conflict between host populations and immigrant groups, raising the question of how conflict can be overcome. We address this question through a field intervention conducted in 31 cities across three German states, designed to measure assistance provided to strangers during everyday social interactions. This randomized trial found that cultural integration signaled by sharing social norms mitigates–but does not eliminate–bias against outgroups driven by perceptions of ethno-religious differences. Our results suggest that eliminating or suppressing ascriptive differences is not a necessary path to conflict reduction in multicultural societies; rather, achieving a shared understanding of civic behavior can form the basis of cooperation.

Authors: Donghyun Danny Choi (Penn), Mathias Poertner (UC Berkeley and EGAP), and Nicholas Sambanis (Penn)