5
propensity for ethnic conflict as a collective action problem.
4
Hence, I hypothesize that mobilizational
resources and individual-specific incentives are important in transforming the structural incentives that
arise from economic liberalization for transforming competitive ethnic-based political action into violent
ethnic conflict.
This paper proceeds as follows: in Section II I review the existing theoretical arguments and
empirical evidence about the incidence and the recent rise in the propensity for ethnic conflict within
multi-ethnic societies undergoing economic liberalization. Section III presents my argument that stresses
a non-linear relationship between economic liberalization and the propensity for ethnic conflict in multi-
ethnic societies. I argue that this non-linear relationship is the result of differences in the existing
mobilizational resources and individual-level incentives. Section IV presents my methodological
improvements for the measurement of the independent and dependent variables as well as the use of two
illustrative case studies for the empirical presentation of my argument.
Section II Literature Review: International economic integration, state institutions, and
ethnic conflict in multiethnic societies
Despite the existence of intra-state ethnic conflict in the postwar era, and despite its recent
increase, there are few complete theoretical accounts for its incidence. And there are even fewer
comparative, or even large-N, empirical analyses. However, there are two different theoretical positions
that attempt to account for the incidence and recent increase of ethnic conflict in the international system.
Both argue for a linear and positive relationship between the level of economic liberalization and the
propensity for the incidence of ethnic conflict in multi-ethnic societies.
The first one is based on the work of Alberto Alesina and his co-authors.
5
In a widely-
disseminated paper, Alesina et al. have argued that “economic integration leads to political
‘disintegration’ ”
6
. By economic integration Alesina et al. mean the level of national trade openness,
measured by the volume of imports plus exports as a share of a country’s GDP. They argue that the
increase in trade openness, given the increased international trade integration that has been witnessed in
the postwar era, has led to an increase of opportunity costs for large, multi-ethnic national trading units.
Alesina et al. argue that high levels of protectionism and the need to create economies of scale for
production in order to generate higher rates of economic development accelerated the solidification of
large, multi-ethnic states in the late 19
th
century and in the pre-war era.
Once protectionism begins to decline, there is no economic need for the more affluent regions of
the multi-ethic state to remain within the state. Once it has become apparent to subnational trading areas
4
To my knowledge, Michael Hechter was the first scholar to analyze nationalist mobilization as a collective action situation.
However, my argument differs from his in terms of what drives individual ethnic groups members to engage in collective ethnic
mobilization drives. See Hechter (2000).
5
To see a diagramatic presentation of this argument see Figure 1 in the Appendix.
Convention