Legacies of Colonial Extra-State Violence in Modern Ethnic Violence

• In Event: New Perspectives on Political Violence

Abstract

A growing body of research has examined the roots of contemporary political development in historic armed conflict (Besley & Reynal-Querol, 2014; Fearon & Laitin, 2014; Wantchekon & García-Ponce, 2011). This paper is related to a subset of this research that points to colonial extra-state conflict as the source of many contemporary state-building failures (Fearon & Laitin, 2014; Wantchekon & García-Ponce, 2011).

There are two main causal narratives of conflict that have emerged from this research. First, ethnic groups that rebelled against colonial domination and exploitation acquired conflict capital that was subsequently deployed against other ethnic groups after independence (Fearon & Laitin, 2014). Second, countries that experienced violent independence movements from colonial rule, such as Kenya, emerged with weak civil societies that failed to be an effective bulwark against inter-group conflict (Wantchekon & García-Ponce, 2011). In this paper, I explore a third dimension of colonial extra-state conflict that remains under-examined viz. the intensity of violence experienced during colonial pacification campaigns that preceded the violence of colonial domination and exploitation. I argue that these campaigns are pivotal for understanding contemporary inter-group conflict since they produced ethnic animosities that were either magnified by subsequent forms of extra-state conflict or directly transmitted to post-independence politics. To understand why this is the case, it is instructive to note that the groups that were targeted in these campaigns were the groups that had recently asserted their power and influence in inter-group relations and were thus seen as a threat to the “traditional” political order that the colonialists wanted to preserve. Conversely, the groups that formed the fifth column in the campaigns were precisely those whose power and influence had been challenged. Consequently, the campaigns generated intense resentment among the targeted groups, who saw their newly acquired status gains quickly reversed, thus laying the foundation for subsequent conflict. A prime illustration of this mechanism is the conflict between the Baganda and Bunyoro in post-independence Uganda. The conflict had its roots in the British pacification campaign in the strategically important coastal region of Uganda during which King Kabarega of the Bunyoro – who had declared revolt against the intrusion of British administration in the region while the Kabaka Mwanga of the Baganda ‘engaged in diplomatic acrobatics rather than military confrontation’ having ‘long been surrounded by and entangled in foreign violence’ – suffered great humiliation at the hands of a large colonial force of gunmen ‘recruited outside Uganda and in Buganda,’ including watching his mother being taken as prisoner (Kabwegyere, 1972, p. 305).

To examine the aforementioned mechanisms empirically, I turn to a novel dataset gathered by Ziltener and his co-authors on the levels of political, economic, and social transformations wrought by colonialism in 83 African and Asian countries (Ziltener, Künzler, & Walter, 2016). The dataset is particularly useful for my purposes since it provides independent country-level measures of the intensity of violence experienced during the pacification, domination, and decolonization phases of colonial rule. Pairing this dataset with data on inter-communal violence from various sources, I show that only variation in the levels of early colonial violence is correlated with the pattern of incidence of inter-communal violence after independence, and this finding is robust to an array of controls, including variation in topography, degree of pre-colonial political centralization, the extent of colonial instrumentalization of ethnicity for administrative purposes, and the arbitrariness of borders. Moving forward, I intend to explore additional empirical specifications, such as instrumental variable regressions, to further establish the robustness of the finding.

References

Besley, T., & Reynal-Querol, M. (2014). The Legacy of Historical Conflict: Evidence from Africa. American Political Science Review, 108(2), 310-336.
Fearon, J. D., & Laitin, D. D. (2014). Does contemporary armed conflicts have "deep historical roots"? Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC.
Kabwegyere, T. B. (1972). The Dynamics of Colonial Violence: The Inductive System in Uganda. Journal of Peace Research, 9(4), 303-314.
Wantchekon, L., & García-Ponce, O. (2011). The Institutional Legacy of African Independence Movements. Princeton University.
Ziltener, P., Künzler, D., & Walter, A. (2016). Measuring the impacts of Colonialism: A new data set for the countries of Africa and Asia Journal of World-Systems Research, 23(1), 156-190.

Author

• Subhasish Ray, National University of Singapore