(Page 9 of 24) - Language Conflict, Political Protest, and Political Violence: Reexamining the Causal Link between Grievance and Action authored by McLaughlin, Eric.

The temptation to subvert the goals of a contentious collective action aimed at

improving the instrumental value of language can thwart the emergence of such
movements. For the purposes of the present analysis, it is particularly important to
emphasize that this subversion logic makes sense only when language is considered as an
instrument and not as a symbol imbued with its own inherent value. If the language
conflict emerges because a language’s use is actively proscribed or persecuted, the
symbolic value of language as an identity marker is under assault and individual
temptation (subversion) cannot be said to thwart collective action in the same way when
there exist, for individuals, no viable alternatives to collective contention. When the
discrimination and language marginalization that gives rise to grievances is overt and
employed as a means to marginalize the existence or identity of the minority group,
subversion of contentious action via assimilation is no longer a reasonable individual
strategy. When the instrumental value of one’s language is low, it may be practicable to
simply find another instrument. When the symbolic value of one’s language is under
assault, no individual action can address the problem. The logic of monitoring and
sanctioning and the logic of subversion can serve to alter the incentives for collective
mobilization for individual members of minority groups in the midst of language conflict.
The former mechanism can be expected to apply to all situations of language conflict
whereas the latter can be expected to apply in instances of language conflict is focused on
a language’s instrumental value rather than on its symbolic or inherent value. As with the
stalemate mechanism, moving from a formal discussion of the mechanisms of
monitoring, sanctioning, and subversion to an empirical test of their relevance in
ameliorating the volatility of real world language conflicts requires the specification of
observable variables capable of serving as proxies for these mechanisms.

Proxies for the Costs of In-Group Mobilization

The extent to which a group is concentrated in a single region

A simple measure that indicates the extent to which a group’s population
within the polity is geographically concentrated can be included in the
empirical model and interacted with the MAR measure for the salience of
language grievances. Collective action “entrepreneurs” for groups that are
highly geographically dispersed are more likely to find the task of
monitoring and sanctioning non-participation in contentious action more
difficult and costly.

The extent to which a group has some pre-existing organization.

The MAR database includes a measure of group organizational cohesion
based on the number of intra-group organizations that exist, their
memberships, their activities, and their long term vitality. Groups that
score high on this index are more likely to have networks (both social and
organizational) that can be exploited for the purposes of monitoring
contributions to any collective movement as well as punishing non-
contributiors.