The Intergroup Politics of Identity and Conflict

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

In recent decades, tremendous levels of immigration, migration, and displacement have created significant challenges to intergroup relations. These unprecedented demographic pressures raise questions about the conditions under which intergroup identity politics lead to inclusion and integration or exclusion and conflict. Despite the importance of these questions, existing scholarship has been mixed or inconclusive, and vexing empirical challenges have made it difficult to isolate causality.

The papers on this panel overcome the challenges of studying identity and conflict through observation and experimental micro-level approaches. Two papers investigate the politics of inclusion. Adida, Lo, Prather, and Williamson use survey experiments to examine the effectiveness two common interventions to promote reduce ingroups’ prejudice toward outgroups. They find that the interventions affect different inclusion-related outcomes. Lee and Zhang flip the analytical lens to outgroups. They explore how military service affects immigrant integration in the United States by exploiting the Vietnam War draft lottery to overcome the problem of self-selection into service. The two other papers on the panel shift focus from integration to conflict. Blair and Krick take advantage of a sudden policy shift that spurred a mass return of Afghan refugees from Iran to Afghanistan, and show that refugee repatriation has cross-cutting effects: increasing insurgent violence but decreases intercommunal violence. Ankori-Karlinsky, Choi, and Sambanis explore how sudden increases in the salience of competing identities – national and sub-national/religious – affect intergroup violence. They leverage exogenous variation in identity salience stemming from the coincidence of national and religious holidays and find that violence is significantly greater when holidays intersect.

Sub Unit

• Division 6: Political Economy

Chair

• Melissa M. Lee University of Pennsylvania

Discussant

• Vasiliki Fouka Stanford University

Individual Presentations

• Changing Hearts & Minds: Interventions to Increase Public Support for Refugees - Claire Leslie Adida, UCSD; Adeline Lo, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Lauren Prather, University of California, San Diego; Scott Williamson, Oxford University

• Military Service & Immigrant Integration: Evidence from the Vietnam War Draft - Nan Zhang, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods; Melissa M. Lee, University of Pennsylvania

• How Refugee Repatriation Shapes Conflict in Destination Communities - Christopher William Blair, Princeton University; Benjamin Curtiss Krick, Duke University

• A Calendar of Conflicts? Intersecting Holidays, Identity, & Intergroup Violence - Lee-Or Ankori-Karlinsky, Brown University; Donghyun Danny Choi, Brown University; Nicholas Sambanis, Yale University