Poverty and Prejudice before Genocide

• In Event: The Causes and Consequences of Conflict

Abstract

Human societies periodically engage in genocide against minorities. What drives prejudice against targeted outgroups in the lead-up to mass killings? We theorize and investigate the role of three sets of factors: political competition, ethno-religious threat, and economic discontent. Our empirical tests leverage a new 30,000-person survey that measured popular Islamophobia in Myanmar shortly before the 2017 ethnic cleansing of the country's Muslim Rohingya population. Integrating survey responses with administrative data, events data, and geodata, we demonstrate a robust association between poverty and anti-Muslim attitudes among members of Myanmar's majority Buddhist community. The relationship holds both ecologically and at the individual level. Meanwhile, other commonly cited political and ethnicity-based explanations for intolerance show minimal predictive power. Our paper sheds fresh light on the material roots of hostile social preferences in ethnically polarized environments. The findings also inform programming efforts to combat intergroup hatreds in high-risk settings.

Authors

• Gareth Nellis, University of California, San Diego

• Michael Weaver, The University of British Columbia

• Constant Courtin, University of British Columbia