Political demography of ethno-nationalist violence

This dissertation makes a probabilistic case for the explanatory and predictive power of the three basic demographic variables---fertility, mortality, and migration---in the study of ethno-nationalist violence. It emancipates ethno-nationalist violence as an explanans distinct from ethnic conflict and political violence. The study of ethnic conflict is devoted to the broader phenomenon of mobilizing latent ethnic identities for political purposes. The study of political violence is devoted to aggressive acts meant to modify the behaviour of others in a bargaining situation with consequences for the society in which they live. The study of ethno-nationalist violence focuses more specifically on recurring acts of physical aggression directed against an identifiable ethnic group perpetrated by members of a group whose identity has already been mobilized politically according to nationalist ideals. In other words, it seeks to understand when and why an ethno-national group might resort to violence or become the victim of violent acts. In order to qualify as ethno-national, (i) a body of citizens bound by shared memories and a common culture (ii) must have been present in a country at the time it was founded. As such, ethno-nationalist violence is a fait social in its own right deserving of an explanation proper.; Yet, the present slate of explananda fares poorly. Supply-side explanations attribute ethno-nationalist violence to grievance. Cultural-distance explanations attribute ethno-nationalist violence to the differentiating effect of ties that bind. Yet, every example of ethno-national violence explicable either in terms of grievance or cultural distance can be countered by examples with comparable grievances and/or cultural equidistance but no violence. Moreover, grievances and cultural distance are relatively constant. Episodes of ethno-nationalist violence, by contrast, come and go.; This investigation posits demographics as having explanatory and possibly predictive value independent of grievance or cultural distance. That is not to say that elites, policies, political discourse, institutions, and the machinery and design of the state do not matter in mitigating or exacerbating the ethno-nationalist violence and its demographic dimensions. To the contrary, from the inquiry emerges a close link between demographic factors and politics. Far from making a deterministic claim about a putative micro-causal relationship between demographic developments and ethno-nationalist violence, the findings imply that political decisions and a state's actions have a direct impact on demographic trends which affect the probability of ethno-nationalist violence in turn. At the same time, the findings warily dispel the stake placed by liberal democrats in institutional engineering as overly optimistic.; The investigation's case is built on youth, asymmetries in age structure, and on migration's potential to mitigate or exacerbate differential demographic trends. It tests the hypotheses that emerge using eight case studies: Northern Ireland, Israel, Estonia, Transylvania, the Xinjiang-Uighur and Tibet autonomous regions in China, Mauritius, and Fiji. Whereas the cases provide strong empirical support for political demography's potential as an explanatory approach and relevant predictor of ethno-nationalist violence beyond grievance and cultural distance, the findings face methodological constraints. These limitations are surmountable. The current state of affairs, however, thwarts their resolution. Methodological limitations notwithstanding, the patterns that emerge validate the non-reducible value of demography in theorizing ethno-nationalist violence.