(Page 2 of 24) - Language Conflict, Political Protest, and Political Violence: Reexamining the Causal Link between Grievance and Action authored by McLaughlin, Eric.

Despite the large volume of research conducted in a subfield of political science

with a long history and an increasingly pressing relevance to contemporary global
problems, there remains a great deal of contestation about the consequences of ethnic,
cultural, and linguistic diversity for governance, political stability, and violence. The
notion that ethnic diversity itself is a direct cause of strife, political instability and
conflict has been debunked in recent years by studies that have highlighted the
mechanisms of interethnic cooperation (Fearon and Laitin 1996) and other causal factors
that seem to trump ethnic diversity in predicting conflict (Fearon and Laitin 2003). In
many senses, however, the jury is still out. The subfield of “ethnic conflict” finds its very
existence predicated on the notion that ethnic warfare and interethnic struggles are
phenomena which are analytically distinct from and often more violent and disastrous
than other more conventional forms of contention (Horowitz 1985). Some take
ethnicity’s causal significance almost for granted (e.g. Huntington 1993; Posen 1993;
Easterly and Levine 1997) while others are less willing to believe in ethnicity’s
distinctive significance (Mueller 2000). In essence, however, most mainstream
arguments with regard to the relationship between ethnic diversity and governance can be
divided into those arguing that ethnic diversity has negative social consequences and
those who argue that ethnic diversity has only minimal or perhaps no negative
consequences. An argument often dismissed out of hand for its counterintuitive nature,
however, is the one that explores the possibility that some aspects of social diversity
might have positive social consequences.

In a 2000 paper, David D. Laitin presents a highly counterintuitive argument

regarding the relationship between the intensity of language conflict between minority
groups and states and the realization of contentious mobilization over these language
grievances (Laitin 2000). In short Laitin concludes, based on his regression analysis of
data from the Minorities at Risk Project

(hereafter “MAR”) that when minority groups

experience language marginalization, the resultant grievances can make them less likely
to engage in political violence. The relationship between conflict and violence is, in the
case of language, presented as negative.

Laitin argues that language grievances, in a sense, are a “straw that strengthens

[rather than breaks] the camel’s back” (emphasis added) (Laitin 2000, p.541). He
explains this relationship, which he himself admits to be somewhat incredible, by relying
on two distinct theoretical propositions. In the first, he uses a simple extensive form
game in which the government, a majority ethnic group, and a minority ethnic group
make interdependent choices about an official language. The state requires the support of
the majority group, and so it offers to select the majority group’s language as its official
tongue. Laitin refers to this action as “language rationalization,” defined in his earlier
work (in the Weberian tradition) as “the emergence of a single, dominant language
in…[the] state, which becomes the official one for education, administration, and cultural
life” (1992, p. ix). Majority groups, Laitin argues, will by and large defect and avoid
colluding in these efforts at language rationalization because they fear that doing so
would provoke the minority group to separate, seek autonomy, and perhaps even threaten
the basis of majority group dominance. Minority groups are thus deterred from taking
positive action against the state because they know that any state commitment to
marginalize them linguistically through language rationalization would not be credible.

2000