Dr Nils Metternich (UCL) "Ethnic Exclusion and the Logic of Political Survival"

Abstract:
Recent research provides increasing theoretical and empirical evidence that the exclusion of ethnic groups increases the risk of armed conflicts. This poses an important puzzle: Why do governments exclude ethnic groups in the first place? We start with the assumption that governments have two goals: stay in power and extract as many resources as possible. We argue that in autocracies, the agency of coalition-formation lies with the strongest ethnic group and this group decides which groups to exclude based on strategic considerations about the likelihood of inside and outside threats as well as the costs of inand exclusion. We test this argument using data on ethnic groups and their power status from the Ethnic Power Relations data set.