Historical Legacies of Political Violence

Abstract

Legacies of political violence are long-term changes in social behavior and attitudes, which are attributable—at least in part—to historical episodes of political conflict and contention. These legacies can potentially reshape the subsequent political and social order. Their catalysts can range from armed conflict, mass repression, and genocide to oppressive institutions and interpersonal violence. The lasting effects of violence include changes in political participation and preferences, intergroup relations, economic activity and growth, and public health outcomes. Estimating these effects presents a methodological challenge, due to selection, posttreatment bias, and the difficulty of isolating specific mechanisms. These challenges are particularly acute given the long time span inherent in studying historical legacies, where effects may be measured generations or centuries after the precipitating event. Understanding these legacies requires distinguishing between persistence mechanisms, where effects of violence continue within an individual directly exposed to violence through trauma, and the secondary transmission of effects between individuals through family socialization, community and peer influences, institutionalization, and epigenetic and evolutionary changes. Research on this subject remains nascent—across many disciplines—and inconclusive on whether violence fosters mostly negative or positive forms of social and political change.

The long-term effects of war exposure on civic engagement

“…Despite the focus on the persistent effects of violence through personal trauma in some earlier work, wartime violence is not experienced in social isolation, but it may also involve community-wide transmission (17). Prosocial motivations and, thus, civic engagement may result from a process of communal coping by which individuals unite to cope with existential threats (12).…”

“…Even though scholars widely acknowledge that the legacy of violence may work through these two pathways, there has been little effort to provide empirical evidence for them (17).…”

“…This could bias the results in favor of more prosocial effects. Third, while scholars often acknowledge the existence of two competing frames to describe the pathways of conflict legacies-namely, persistence for first-order exposed individuals and transmission of effects to new secondarily exposed individuals-there have been few efforts to empirically distinguish between the two (17). Fourth, the nonrandom geographical distribution of conflict violence hampers our ability to establish a causal relationship from conflict exposure to preferences.…”

War and Nationalism: How WW1 battle deaths fueled civilians’ support for the Nazi Party

“…In examining whether exposure to war casualties fosters nationalism, this paper builds on two main research strands. One body of research investigates the effects of exposure to violence on political attitudes and behavior (see reviews by Bauer et al 2016;Walden and Zhukov 2020).…”

“…These studies demonstrate that victimization can have long-term effects on in-group cohesion, hostility towards former opponents and preferences for hawkish foreign policies. However, in this research strand the "measurement of exposure to violent events is nearly universally tied to physical nearness" (Walden and Zhukov 2020). Thus, it provides limited insights on the effects of wars on communities that are located outside of combat zones and experience violence indirectly through returning combatants and the loss of relatives.…”