Explaining Ethnic Violence: On the Relevance of Geographic, Social, Economic, and Political Factors in Hate Crimes on Refugees

Abstract

Many Western societies experience recurring patterns of violence against ethnic minorities, immigrants, refugees, and other asylum seekers, making it important to better understand which conditions increase (or decrease) the likelihood of hate crimes. In this article, we test the relevance of different geographic, social, economic, and political conditions for attacks on refugees. To this end, we conduct an event-history analysis for Germany between 2014 and 2017, when Germany experienced a sharp rise and subsequent decline in assaults on refugees with up to 142 personal and miscellaneous (such as assaults and insults) and 11 arson attacks on refugee homes and refugees per week. We analyse these incidents at the district level and derive hypotheses from theoretical considerations on geographic proximity, social similarity, political opportunity structures, competition for resources, opportunities of contact with foreigners, and differences between East and West Germany. Irrespective of the type of attack, the results of Cox regression models support our theoretical reasoning on diffusion processes, geographical proximity, and the contact hypothesis. There is no support for the model-adopter similarity and competition-for-resources hypothesis. The type of violence matters with regard to the importance of political opportunity structures and differences between East and West Germany. Our findings show the importance of differentiating between different types of violence and accounting for the context-dependency of ethnic violence for future research.

Media coverage, fake news, and the diffusion of xenophobic violence: A fine-grained county-level analysis of the geographic and temporal patterns of arson attacks during the German refugee crisis 2015–2017

“…Data basis of the chronicle are publicly available newspaper reports, press releases of the police as well as reports from local and regional helpdesks for victims of right-wing, racist, and antisemitic violence [87]. The same data source was used by other researchers [8][9][10][11], although most of them do not distinguish between arson attacks and other forms of violence.…”

“…As mentioned, the high numbers of arriving refugees and asylum seekers were politicized far beyond right-wing extremist parties and led to unprecedented numbers of violent attacks against refugees and asylum seekers [for a historic overview, see 6]. We draw on many other studies that have investigated certain aspects of xenophobic violence against refugees in this time period [7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. However, our paper tries to include a wider picture of potential explanatory factors.…”

“…• Do opportunities for contact between ethnic groups diminish violence? Our focus for this endeavor is on arson attacks (for the only other study that analyzes arson attacks separately, see [11]). Arson attacks have a long tradition in the history of xenophobia and racism [6], and are usually directed against the residential places where minority groups live or are designated to live.…”

“…Just like medical or industrial innovations, fashion trends, drug use and social movements of all kinds [14][15][16], researchers have conceptualized political violence (such as wars, coups, disorders, terrorism, and homicides) as phenomena that diffuse through social networks by contagion [14,[17][18][19][20][21]. In more recent years, scientific studies have increasingly focused on-and provided evidence for-contagion effects related to the spread of xenophobic violence in time and space [8,9,11,22,23].…”

“…Empirical evidence is somewhat mixed. Among the studies that have analyzed xenophobic violence in the context of the refugee crisis in Germany, some have found support [7][8][9] or partial support [11,13] for contact theory. Schaub et al [12], however, who examine refugeerelated attitudes and behaviors around the same time, come to a more skeptical conclusion.…”