Does Ethnicity Matter? A Study of Ethnic Pluralism and Political Instability in Africa

Abstract

The prevalence of intrastate violence in Africa makes understanding the sources of instability particularly important to conflict prevention. Why is civil violence more common in Africa? What causes African countries to be more politically unstable? Recent research on civil conflict has increasingly incorporated measures of ethnic pluralism to account for variation in levels of political violence. This work has generated a debate about whether and how ethnic pluralism matters. Easterly and Levine (1997), for example, argue that higher levels of ethnic diversity encourage instability. Collier (2000) instead finds that the likelihood of civil unrest decreases at high levels of ethnic diversity. Englebert (2000) contends that as the result of their simplistic view of ethnic identity and the empirical fragility of the indices they use, theories of ethnic fractionalization fail to explain why some countries are more prone to political violence than others. In this paper, I conduct my own study of the effects of ethnic diversity on events of political instability. I examine whether the empirical shortcomings of current measures of ethnic diversity do in fact detract from the explanatory power of the variable or whether ethnic heterogeneity can determine the likelihood of civil unrest. My goal is to systematically expand on Englebert's hypothesis that ethnic heterogeneity is a weak predictor of economic stagnation in Africa and test how well ethnic pluralism predicts civil unrest.