The Impact of Language Policies on the Civil War Onset

• In Event: Poster Session: Conflict Processes II

Abstract

Grievances and opportunity are identified as the main causes of civil wars. A large portion of studies in the literature focuses exclusively on opportunity-based mechanisms. Despite the recognition that the majority of civil wars are fought between ethnolinguistic groups where grievances play an important role, causal mechanisms under which grievances lead to civil wars are underexplored. Grievance-based explanations were largely ignored in earlier studies due to the use of proxies that are overly simplistic and that have low relevance. Scholars have often used the level of economic inequality as a proxy for grievances. The level of inequality is not a suitable proxy for grievances for several reasons. First, due to its material nature, this measure overlaps with the opportunity of individuals. Second, an exclusive emphasis on economic inequality fails to consider non-economic sources of grievances. In addition, measures at the individual or the state level of analysis, prevalent in the grievance literature, may not tell us much about civil wars that mainly take place at the group-level and the organization-level. To improve our understanding of identity-related grievances, this paper introduces a new dataset that includes new measurements of grievances at the group-level based on the language policies of central governments toward their ethnic minorities. Using the Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) Core Dataset to identify the individual ethnic groups, this new data provides us with more isolated measurements of ethnic grievances, while also highlighting the interplay between grievances and opportunity. The preliminary findings based on an early phase of data collection efforts suggest that grievances caused by discriminatory language policies are influential on the onset of civil war. More specifically, the findings suggest that education being offered in the language spoken by a minority ethnic group decreases the likelihood of conflict onset between a rebel group representing the ethnic group and the government. This paper argues that measurements resulting from a more refined conceptualization of grievances offers empirical and theoretical advantages to improving our understanding of the dynamics of civil war.

Author

• Burak Demir, University of Tennessee, Knoxville