Diversity and Conflict

Abstract

This research establishes that the emergence, prevalence, recurrence, and severity of intrastate conflicts in the modern era reflect the long shadow of prehistory. Exploiting variations across national populations, it demonstrates that genetic diversity, as determined predominantly during the exodus of humans from Africa tens of thousands of years ago, has contributed significantly to the frequency, incidence, and onset of both overall and ethnic civil conflict over the last half-century, accounting for a large set of geographical and institutional correlates of conflict, as well as measures of economic development. Furthermore, the analysis establishes the significant contribution of genetic diversity to the intensity of social unrest and to the incidence of intragroup factional conflict. These findings arguably reflect the contribution of genetic diversity to the degree of fractionalization and polarization across ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups in the national population; the adverse influence of genetic diversity on interpersonal trust and cooperation; the contribution of genetic diversity to divergence in preferences for public goods and redistributive policies; and the potential impact of genetic diversity on economic inequality within a society.

Culture, Ethnicity, and Diversity

“…These measures take different forms: some account for distance between groups Ray 1994, 2011;Duclos, Esteban, and Ray 2004;Bossert, d'Ambrosio, and La Ferrara 2011;Esteban, Mayoral, and Ray 2012); others look at income inequality between ethnic groups (Huber and Mayoral 2013;Alesina, Michalopoulos, and Papaioannou 2016) or the historical depth of ethnic cleavages (Desmet, Ortuño-Ortín, and Wacziarg 2012); yet others consider heterogeneity between individuals rather than groups (Ashraf and Galor 2013a;Arbatli, Ashraf, and Galor 2015). Our paper is related to this literature because we propose new indices of heterogeneity both between and within ethnic groups.…”

“…14 One possible explanation for the large share of within-group diversity is outlined in Arbatli, Ashraf, and Galor (2015): if initial diversity is positively associated with the formation of groups (Ashraf and Galor 2013b), yet there are scale effects implying a lower bound on the size of groups, then societies with particularly diverse traits will display both a high level of overall diversity while also displaying high within-group diversity. Such a mechanism could partly explain why total diversity is much larger than between-group diversity-both when considering genetic and cultural diversity.…”

“…Ashraf and Galor (2013a) investigate the effect of genetic diversity on historical and contemporary economic performance. In Arbatli, Ashraf, and Galor (2015), genetic diversity is found to have a positive effect on the probability of civil conflict. The latter two papers were the first to consider measures of overall diversity between individuals within societies, something that previous measures of diversity (such as the commonly used measure of ethnic group fractionalization) failed to do.…”

Ancestry, Language and Culture

“…3 However, as already mentioned, in our analysis we do not focus on the direct e¤ects of intergenerationally transmitted traits subject to selection, but on general measures of ancestry based on neutral genes, which tend to change randomly over time, and capture long-term relatedness across populations. Finally, our work is connected to a di¤erent but related set of contributions focusing on the economic and political e¤ects of genetic and cultural diversity not between populations, but within populations and societies Galor, 2013a, 2013b;Arbatli, Ashraf andGalor, 2013, Desmet, Ortuño-Ortín and. This paper is organized as follows.…”

Population Diversity, Division of Labor and the Emergence of Trade and State

“…In particular, Arbatli et al (2013) have argued that genetic diversity provides a "deeper" and better measure of diversity at the country level. Similarly, using cross-country data it has been shown that a sizable variation in income (Ashraf and Galor, 2013b), prevalence of civil conflict (Arbatli et al, 2013), mistrust and cultural fragmentation (Ashraf and Galor, 2013a) can be attributed to variations in genetic diversity.…”