Diversity and Contagion in Conflict: Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Late Imperial Russia

• In Event: Frontiers in Historical Political Economy

Abstract

We explore the relationship between diversity and conflict using data from late Imperial Russia, with a focus on anti-Jewish pogroms (Grosfeld, Sakalli and Zhuravskaya, 2020). Our theoretical and empirical framework combines two perspectives: the spatial diffusion of conflict and its interaction with structural factors (Aidt and Leon-Ablan 2021) and the role of ethno-religious heterogeneity in provoking conflict (Esteban, Mayoral, and Ray 2012; Bauer et al., 2018; Fox, 1999). Exploiting data from the 1897 Russian census, we derive measures of religious diversity (polarization and segregation) for all districts and settlements with > 500 residents within the Pale of Settlement. For our spatial analysis, we use geographic coordinates of all settlements with Jewish residents and the location of pogroms from 1904 to 1906 (Spitzer 2015). Our preliminary results show that the incidence of pogroms depends on religious heterogeneity not only within settlements, but also in their neighborhood, which affects the intensity of diffusion. These findings demonstrate the importance of ethno-religious diversity for the propagation of inter-ethnic conflict. We will extend our analysis by considering other types of conflict and alternative computation of spatial distance.

Authors

• Scott Gehlbach, University of Chicago

• Dmitrii Kofanov, University of Barcelona

• Steven Nafziger, Williams College

• Paul Castañeda Dower, University of Wisconsin-Madison