The Incidence of Intra-State Ethnic Violence: An Empirical Study on Ethnicity and Values

What best explains conflict? Why do societies engage in violence, or better yet, why are some societies more likely to fall victim towards internal instability and civil war? This paper seeks to better understand what factors offer the most explanatory power for intra-state violence. While some scholars have pointed towards primordialist ethnic and cultural differences as the root of many conflicts, others have pointed towards past grievances, inadequate or repressive political institutions, untapped economic opportunities, or even the persistence of organized crime. Yet, while much of the literature focuses on the impact of cultural or ethnic diversity as the main variable of interest, this paper separates itself from the literature by instead questioning whether it is in fact a society’s cultural values that lends itself more likely to engage in ethnic civil war. Utilizing Geert Hofstede’s 6-D model of cultural dimensions, I construct a dataset incorporating intra-state data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program/Peace Research Institute of Olso to determine which factors offer the best account for understanding the incidence of intra-state conflict and war. In doing so, the objective is to demonstrate whether certain national cultural values are more likely to indicate the proclivity of a state to succumb towards instability and civil war, rather than ethnic, cultural, or religious diversity. All in all, this paper finds that both Hofstede’s power distance index and uncertainty avoidance index exhibit statistically significant results. While these findings are significant for reconsidering the role that ethnicity plays in intra-state conflict, there are some notable limitations of this analysis. In particular, quantifying a culture or ethnicity is far from simple, and remains contentious. Subsequently, while the first segment of this paper will focus predominately on the quantitative study, the second part of this paper will introduce a meta-analysis on the techniques used throughout this study. In doing so, this paper recognizes much of the quantitative limitations in aggregating the gap between proxies and reality, and consequently, seeks to discuss why more qualitative analysis will be needed in order to substantiate the legitimacy and robustness of this paper’s findings.