Colonial legacy, linguistic disenfranchisement and the civil conflict in Sri Lanka

Paul Castañeda Dower, Victor Ginsburgh and Shlomo Weber ()

No 2014048, LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE from Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE)

Abstract: Polarization measures, that are used in examining the empirical relationship between ethnic divisions and violent conflict, heavily rely on mechanisms of group identification and often use somewhat arbitrary divisions of a society into ethnic groups. In this paper we construct two new measures of polarization, one that accounts for differences in linguistic policies across localities during the colonial era and one that accounts for the differences over time and across localities in the experience of violence throughout the conflict episode. By examining the protracted war in Sri Lanka and applying these indices (and their combination) to a data set describing victims of the civil conflict by district and year, we are able to better identify the effect of ethnolinguistic polarization on the civil conflict in the country. We find that, for each of our polarization indices, there is a positive effect on the conflict. The historical underpinnings of our indices allow us to demonstrate in a quantitative and concrete way the relevance of historical processes for understanding episodes of civil conflict.

Keywords: conflict; polarization; Sri Lanka; colonial legacy; linguistic disenfranchisement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 F54 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-11-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://sites.uclouvain.be/core/publications/coredp/coredp2014.html (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Colonial Legacy, Linguistic Disenfranchisement and the Civil Conflict in Sri Lanka (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cor:louvco:2014048

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE from Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) Voie du Roman Pays 34, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alain GILLIS ().