CURRENT BOOK PROJECT
Why Conflicts Become Ethnic
a book project with Alexandra Siegel
Fourate Chahal El Rebkaby
Ethnic conflict is often understood as violence between fixed ethnic groups, but constructivist perspectives emphasize that conflict itself can reshape and sharpen ethnic identities. This project develops a new framework for studying the ethnicization of conflict, which we define as a dynamic process through which ethnic identities become more salient and/or new ethnic identities are constructed in the context of conflict. We document when and to what extent ethnicization occurs, identify who and what drives it, and explain why conflicts follow different ethnic trajectories.
This project is supported by a two-year Distinguished Scholar Award from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.
Central Questions
When, and to what extent, do conflicts become ethnicized? How do the magnitude, timing, and persistence of ethnicization vary within and across conflicts?
What drives ethnicization? Under what conditions does ethnic identity become more salient, and what role does violence play?
Who drives ethnicization, and how does it spread? What is the role of elites relative to masses, and domestic versus transnational actors?
Why do conflicts follow different ethnic trajectories? Why does ethnicization intensify and persist in some cases, but fail to take hold or reverse in others?
Our Approach
While ethnicization can unfold in multiple domains, we focus on public discourse as a key site and means of ethnicization. To capture this process, we introduce and validate a new measure—the relative prevalence of ethnic rhetoric in public discourse about conflict—using computational methods applied to large-scale social media data. This allows us to move beyond classifying conflicts as “ethnic” or “non-ethnic” and instead trace when, where, and through whom ethnicization unfolds.
We combine these measures with data on violence, political events, ethnic demography, and online networks to develop and test competing explanations for ethnicization. Comparing these dynamics across Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Ukraine, we seek to explain why ethnicization intensifies and persists in some conflicts, but fails to take hold or reverses in others.