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HATE NARRATIVES AND ETHNIC CONFLICT
by Arman Grigorian.
The Center of Strategic and International Studies and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
International Security
Spring 2007
Arman Grigorian is Visiting Assistant Professor of Government at
the College of William and Mary. He thanks Kevin Narizny, Holger
Schmidt, Michael Tierney, and Carola Weil for helpful comments.;
Stuart J. Kaufman.
Stuart J. Kaufman is Professor of Political Science and International
Relations at the University of Delaware.
BODY:
To the Editors:
In his recent article, Stuart Kaufman subjects a set of rationalist
theories of ethnic conflict to strong criticism and proposes
his theory of "symbolic politics" as a superior alternative. n1
Drawing on his earlier work, n2 Kaufman argues that violence between
ethnic groups is best understood not as a consequence of security
dilemmas, informational asymmetries, commitment problems, or elite
manipulation, but instead as a consequence of the content of ethnic
groups' identities, which he calls "myth-symbol complexes." n3 These
complexes are basically mythologized narratives of an ethnic group's
culture and history, which also contain depictions of certain target
groups as victimizers or inferiors (pp. 50-51). Feelings of enmity
are the result of such narratives, according to Kaufman, and violence
is the result of such feelings.
n1. Stuart J. Kaufman, "Symbolic Politics or Rational Choice? Testing
Theories of Extreme Ethnic Violence," International Security, Vol.
30, No. 4 (Spring 2006), pp. 45-86. All further references to this
article appear parenthetically in the text.
n2. Stuart J. Kaufman, Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic
War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001).
n3. Kaufman's argument should be distinguished from arguments that
hold nationalism responsible for ethnic conflicts, where nationalism
is understood as a doctrine demanding congruence of cultural and
political boundaries. Kaufman's argument is not about nationalism in
this more traditional sense, but about nationalism as a narrative.
More generally, it should be distinguished from any theory of group
conflict that sees its causes outside the content of conflicting
groups' identities. The difference is discussed in James D. Fearon
and David D. Laitin, "Violence and the Social Construction of Ethnic
Identity," International Organization, Vol. 54, No. 4 (October 2000),
pp. 845-877.
Kaufman tests this theory against the aforementioned rationalist
theories in the context of the conflicts in southern Sudan and
Rwanda. He concludes that the evidence from these cases strongly
supports his theory, while disconfirming the rationalist ones. I argue
in this brief comment, however, that students of ethnic conflict should
not rush to endorse Kaufman's conclusions. Even if the rationalist
theories in question have problems, they should not be discarded on
the basis of his critique. In fact, endorsing Kaufman's conclusions,
and especially endorsing his proposed alternative, would mean not just
discarding the theories that are the subject of his criticism. It
is not even the rationalist enterprise as a whole that would have
to be jettisoned. The symbolic politics theory has something much
more general in its crosshairs, namely, theories with structural and
material causes. The symbolic politics theory itself is essentially
a somewhat more systematic articulation of a popular, but erroneous,
belief that ethnic conflicts result from little more than irrational
hatreds rooted in culture. n4
n4. Kaufman distances himself from the popularly known "ancient hatred
theory," arguing that "attitudes and even identities in question have
varied over time" (p. 45). What is interesting about the ancient hatred
theory, however, is the part about hatred, not the part claiming that
the hatreds are ancient.
The errors in Kaufman's version of this popular belief can be grouped
into three general categories. First, his empirical test is not
appropriately designed to demonstrate what the symbolic politics
theory implies. Second, Kaufman fails to report evidence that could
potentially disconfirm his theory. Third, he misinterprets some
evidence by arbitrarily redefining certain concepts as consistent
with and related to his theory when they are not.
DESIGN FLAWS
The problems in Kaufman's empirical analysis become apparent even
before combing through the evidence that he presents in the case
studies. They begin with the empirical hypotheses Kaufman derives
both from his theory and the rationalist alternatives, which are
supposed to guide the search for and the analysis of appropriate
evidence. He derives six hypotheses from his theory, dividing them
into two groups. The first group concerns the preconditions for ethnic
war, and the second the mobilization for violent conflict. The first
group includes hypotheses about the existence of "widespread group
myths [that] explicitly [justify] hostility toward or the need to
dominate the ethnic adversary"; the presence of strong "fear[s]
of group extinction"; and the existence of a territorial base (p. 58).
The second group includes hypotheses about "extreme mass hostility
... expressed in the media and ... popular support for the goal of
political domination over ethnic rivals"; use of "symbolic appeals to
group myths, tapping into and promoting fear and mass hostility"; and
the rise of a "predation-driven security dilemma," where the extremism
on one side results in the radicalization of the "leadership on the
other" (ibid).
Even a cursory look at these hypotheses makes clear that the successful
discovery of confirming evidence for any or all of them will at best
demonstrate the existence of hostile myths and hate narratives,
and not that a given ethnic conflict was caused by such myths and
narratives--unless one assumes that the very existence of such myths
and narratives confirms the symbolic politics theory because no other
theory in principle can account for them. That, however, would not be
a justified assumption, because of the reasonable possibility that
causality may run in the opposite direction. After all, it would be
difficult to find any conflict that was not accompanied by rallies
around the flag, remembrances of heroes and martyrs of wars past,
and hateful and hostile rhetoric directed at the opponent. Such
behavior invariably accompanies conflicts, because conflicts
cause it. An argument can also be made that increased nationalist
fervor, attitudes of hate, and contempt directed at an adversary are
instrumental, because intense identification with one's group can be
an effective way of increasing internal cohesion and fighter morale,
n5 while well-conditioned hostility toward or racist contempt for the
adversary may be psychologically necessary to discriminate, persecute,
or kill. This is not necessarily a denial of the possibility that
hatred can cause a conflict. But any claim to that effect should
involve a serious effort to rule out reverse causality. That is what
Kaufman's null hypothesis should be, not whether a particular conflict
was caused by the specific rationalist mechanisms under his scrutiny.
n5. See Barry R. Posen, "The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict,"
in Michael E. Brown, ed., Ethnic Conflict and International Security
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Barry R.
Posen, "Nationalism, the Mass Army, and Military Power," International
Security, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Fall 1993), pp. 80-124.
SINS OF OMISSION
The stories Kaufman tells about the conflicts in southern Sudan and
Rwanda are incomplete. In the case of Sudan, he is silent about the
open and intense dispute over the constitution of the country not
long after it became independent in 1956. The population of the south
insisted on a federal system, while the Arab-dominated government in
Khartoum resisted, insisting on a unitary state. It was the failure
of these negotiations that produced the first southern insurgency,
which had self-determination as its explicit goal, and which led to
a civil war as the Khartoum government refused to concede. n6 The
conflict evolved, of course, creating new problems, grievances,
and demands over the next several decades, but fundamentally it
remained about the degree of autonomy the south would have. The
basis for such a claim is the content of the negotiations that took
place periodically throughout the entire period of the civil war,
and especially the content of the negotiations that eventually led
to a settlement in 2005. n7
n6. Douglas H. Johnson, The Root Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), pp. 30-31.
n7. International Crisis Group, "The Khartoum-SPLM Agreement: Sudan's
Uncertain Peace," Africa Report, No. 96 (Geneva: International Crisis
Group, July 25, 2005).
In the case of Rwanda, Kaufman does not entirely ignore the
long-simmering war that preceded the 1994 genocide, but he says little
about its origins. The issue there was not autonomy or secession for
a minority, but control of the country as a whole and the inability
or the unwillingness of the Tutsi and Hutu elites to agree on a
workable power-sharing arrangement following decolonization. Such
an arrangement would have ended the domination of the majority Hutu
by the minority Tutsi, which had characterized their relationship
since the precolonial period. Also incontrovertible are the facts of
both Hutu mobilization against precisely this system toward the end
of the colonial period and Tutsi resistance against Hutu demands for
majority rule. The tensions produced by these conflicting preferences
eventually exploded into violence in 1959, which resulted in the
exodus of tens of thousands of Tutsis into neighboring countries and
the shift of power from the Tutsi to the Hutu. n8 This was not the
end of the story, however, because the Tutsis who had been forced out
refused to accept either their fate or that Rwanda had come under Hutu
control. Their periodic attempts both to return and to restore their
control over the country, and Hutu resistance against these attempts,
kept the conflict alive in Rwanda for several decades. The conflict
eventually culminated in the 1994 genocide, as a powerful segment
of the Hutu elite concluded that the power-sharing agreement signed
by President Juvenal Habyarimana in 1993 under strong third-party
pressure amounted to handing the country back to the Tutsis. n9
n8. Gerard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 41-54.
n9. See Bruce Jones, "Military Intervention in Rwanda's Two Wars:
Partisanship and Indifference," in Jack Snyder and Barbara F. Walter,
eds., Civil Wars, Insecurity, and Intervention (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1999), pp. 118-121; and Alan J. Kuperman, The Limits
of Humanitarian Intervention: Genocide in Rwanda (Washington, D.C.:
Brookings, 2001), p. 11.
In an attempt to rebut some potential rationalist counterarguments,
Kaufman does acknowledge this, and indeed does not dispute the
conclusion that the agreement Habyarimana signed amounted to handing
the country back to the Tutsis. But he argues that genocide was not
a rational preemptive response, because it was obvious that it would
not affect the final outcome (p. 79). Such an argument, however,
depends too much on hindsight. It also depends on evidence that the
perpetrators themselves clearly saw the strategic futility of genocide,
which Kaufman does not provide.
I should clarify what I am not arguing here. I am not arguing that
the problem of the degree of autonomy in southern Sudan or the
conflicting claims of control over Rwanda were sufficient causes of
the bloodshed in those countries. Problems of political status and
conflicting demands for power are more ubiquitous than civil wars and
genocides. Moreover, the intensity of the conflicts in both southern
Sudan and Rwanda varied over time. Additional variables would be
necessary to explain that variation, as well as the more general fact
that not all potential conflicts of sovereignty and power degenerate
into violence. What is at issue, however, is not only, or mainly,
the causes of violence in ethnic disputes (including those in Sudan
and Rwanda) but the causes of those disputes themselves, which is
primarily what Kaufman's symbolic politics theory is about. n10 And
as such, it does not demonstrate that the conflicts in question would
not have happened in the absence of the hateful mythologies but with
the same sort of conflicting preferences over status and power. Nor
does it demonstrate that the hateful mythologies themselves and their
political deployments were not the consequences of those conflicts.
In fact, given the long histories of domination, exploitation, and
violence that have characterized the relationships of the ethnic
antagonists in southern Sudan and Rwanda, as well as the intense
differences they had over the political status of southern Sudan and
the control over Rwanda, a real puzzle would have been the absence
of hate narratives in their cultures.
n10. Kaufman writes that ethnic myths that justify predatory policy are
"a necessary precondition for ethnic war" (pp. 52-53, 81). His theory
does have two additional variables, fear and opportunity, that are
supposed to explain when these myths are translated into violence
(p. 63). He does not, however, operationalize opportunity in a way
that would allow one to make systematic predictions about when to
expect violence. Any evidence of a myth-symbol complex that fails to
produce violence can always be ascribed to the lack of opportunity,
which makes the theory at least partially immune to criticism. The
opportunity variable plays no role in Kaufman's empirical analysis
anyway. He admits this explicitly by stating that "in Sudan, lack of
opportunity is rarely a constraint on the outbreak of ethnic war" (p.
63), and that in Rwanda, "the Hutu elite obviously had the opportunity
to organize ethnic violence at any time, as long as they held
government power" (p. 73). His treatment of fear has a similar problem:
the operationalization of its intensity seems to depend on the outcome.
SINS OF COMMISSION
One possible answer Kaufman can offer in response to the criticism
above is that he not only accounts for conflicting preferences over
status and power, but that he also emphasizes them as integral to his
theory, as well as in response to the rationalists' tendency to assume
peaceful, status quo preferences. He argues, more specifically, that
"chauvinist leaders always claim to be driven by security motives,
but what makes them chauvinists is that they define their group's
security as requiring dominance over rival groups--which is, naturally,
threatening to the others. If two or more competing groups feel they
need to dominate over the same territory, the result is a security
dilemma: neither group feels secure unless its status needs are met,
but both sets of demands cannot be satisfied at once" (p. 54). Even
assuming for a moment that the claim is empirically justified
and ignoring the misunderstanding of what it means to describe
a situation as a security dilemma, n11 the claim makes Kaufman's
theory inconsistent ontologically. We are being told simultaneously
that ethnic conflicts are the result of hate narratives rooted in
ethnic groups' "myth-symbol complexes" and that they are caused by
competition for territory and status. The fallback position would be
to argue that power and status maximization are also consequences of
certain narratives, but such a move would require a procedure for
ruling out power and status maximization for noncultural reasons,
which is missing from Kaufman's theory. Moreover, given that so many
cultures seem to be afflicted by the same pathology, it is highly
unlikely that culture is the problem. n12
n11. The "dilemma" in the security dilemma is that an actor motivated
by security faces the competing risks of doing nothing and being
attacked or attacking unnecessarily when there are advantages to
attacking first. If actors are motivated by the "need to dominate
over the same territory," there is no dilemma.
n12. Some scholars maintain that the universality of certain behaviors
and patterns is not inherently problematic for the culturalist
paradigm. Alexander Wendt, for example, has framed social identity
theory in culturalist terms despite its universalistic character. See
Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999). As Jack Snyder has pointed out, however,
theories about universal tendencies fit "uneasily with the basic
ontology the cultural theorists propound."
See Snyder, "Anarchy and Culture: Insights from the Anthropology of
War," International Organization, Vol. 56, No. 1 (February 2002),
p. 19.
The more important problem, however, is that dismissing defensive
motives in ethnic conflicts is not justified empirically either.
Kaufman may be correct in arguing that security is not the sole concern
motivating ethnic groups in conflict, n13 but it is unreasonable to
claim that security is never a concern. Note that Kaufman's claim does
not have the form of a convenient assumption to prove some analytical
point. It is fundamentally an empirical claim.
The problem is that the research design of the article, which
consists of two case studies, in addition to passing references to a
couple of other conflicts, is ill suited to demonstrate the veracity
of such a claim. n14 Moreover, the groups that are the targets of
greed-driven, "chauvinist" mobilizations would likely have incentives
to countermobilize and (correctly) justify it as necessary to their
own security, which they invariably do using the same hostile and
hyperpatriotic language. Reactive and defensive mobilization is
actually one of Kaufman's empirical hypotheses (p. 58), but he fails
to realize that ruling out security-driven nationalist mobilization
in principle makes such a hypothesis problematic.
n13. Kaufman may be exaggerating the significance of the assumption,
however. The assumption of benign motives should not be interpreted
to mean literally that greed is never the motive. The idea rather
is to demonstrate that conflicts can occur even when greed is not
the motive. In fact, the possibility of greedy motives is indirectly
built into the security dilemma. See Andrew Kydd, "Sheep in Sheep's
Clothing: Why Security Seekers Do Not Fight Each Other," Security
Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Autumn 1997), pp. 114-154. In addition, there
are rationalist theories of ethnonationalist violence that allow for
motives that are less benign than security seeking. See, for example,
Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, "Greed and Grievance in Civil Wars,"
Oxford Economic Papers, Vol. 56, No. 4 (October 2004), pp. 563-595; and
Benjamin A. Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in
the Twentieth Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004).
n14. For how to pose the question regarding the motives behind ethnic
civil wars correctly, as well as the more appropriate methodology
for answering such a question, see Nicholas Sambanis, "Do Ethnic and
Nonethnic Civil Wars Have the Same Causes? A Theoretical and Empirical
Inquiry (Part 1)," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 45, No. 3
(June 2001), pp. 259-282. The argument here is not against the case
study method, but rather for its proper employment.
A related tension is evident in the attempt to represent
countermobilizations as consequences of myth-symbol complexes. Even
though the southern Sudanese were the targets of the north's predatory
behavior, Kaufman argues that their mobilization was not simply a
defensive response to it, but was rather due to the Dinka "myths"
about their history of enslavement by the Arabs (pp. 62-63).
Kaufman does not explain, however, why the north's predatory behavior
was not enough for the Dinka to countermobilize, if indeed the Arab
behavior was predatory. Elsewhere Kaufman describes the Azerbaijani
mobilization against the Armenian demands in Nagorno-Karabagh as
mobilization against the "symbol" of Armenian threats. n15 Again,
if the problem had been Armenians' predatory behavior, which is what
Kaufman claims, Azerbaijanis would have mobilized against it with or
without any "symbols" of Armenian threats. This example also makes one
wonder what would not be a symbol or an example of symbolic politics.
n15. See Kaufman, Modern Hatreds, p. 94.
A word is also in order about the treatment of fear in Kaufman's
argument. He defines all fear-driven behavior as irrational,
because fear is an emotion, and goes so far as to claim that the
title of the article by Rui de Figueredo and Barry Weingast--"The
Rationality of Fear"--is an oxymoron (p. 83). Some fears--such as
hypochondria--are definitely irrational. Other fears--such as the
fear of dying in a plane crash--are definitely exaggerations given
the statistical risks. But are no fears rational? Surely some fears
result from a correct assessment of threats and dangers. Kaufman goes
even further with the following claim: "Because the fear is subjective,
a probabilistic understanding of its effect is appropriate" (p. 53). It
is not entirely clear what the aim of this sentence is, but the context
seems to imply that even the concept of uncertainty belongs to the
"symbolist" camp, which, of course, is a bizarre claim. That, however,
does not stop Kaufman from confidently describing all fear-driven
behavior as irrational and chalking up examples of it as supporting
evidence for the symbolic politics theory.
CONCLUSION
Kaufman's article has confused much and illuminated little about the
causes of ethnic conflicts. It has essentially dressed up in academic
garb an old, but mistaken, belief about the fundamental irrationality
and cultural roots of these conflicts. In the process, Kaufman
has failed to identify and rule out the correct null hypothesis;
he has presented narratives of the conflicts in southern Sudan and
Rwanda that fail to account for a number of important facts; and he
has introduced a substantial amount of intellectual contraband into
the symbolic politics theory to account for certain inconsistencies
that it otherwise could not. Students of ethnic conflict, therefore,
should treat Kaufman's findings and conclusions with a healthy dose
of skepticism.
--Arman Grigorian Williamsburg, Virginia
Stuart J. Kaufman Replies:
In "Symbolic Politics or Rational Choice," I argue that the outbreak
of ethnic war in Sudan in 1983 and the Rwanda genocide in 1994 can
best be understood from the perspective of symbolic politics theory.
Symbolic politics theory identifies six causal variables for explaining
extreme ethnic violence: ethnic myths justifying hostility, fears of
group extinction, opportunity to mobilize, extreme mass hostility,
chauvinist political mobilization, and a predation-driven interethnic
security dilemma. The article further shows that rational choice models
fail to account for what occurred in the Sudan and Rwanda cases. n1
Arman Grigorian offers a number of criticisms of this article. In
this response, I identify two key areas in which he misunderstands
my argument and respond to three other general issues he raises.
n1. Stuart J. Kaufman, "Symbolic Politics or Rational Choice? Testing
Theories of Extreme Ethnic Violence," International Security, Vol.
30, No. 4 (Spring 2006), pp. 85-86.
WHAT ARE THE ISSUES?
In Grigorian's view, "What is at issue ... is not only, or mainly,
the causes of violence in ethnic disputes ... but the causes of those
disputes themselves." Based on this assumption, Grigorian concludes
that the point of my article is to advocate the wholesale abandonment
of the rational choice enterprise and of all "theories with structural
and material causes."
Grigorian is wrong, however, about both my dependent variable and my
theoretical target. As stated in the title and throughout the article,
the dependent variable is extreme ethnic violence (i.e., ethnic war
and genocide), not the causes of the initial disputes.
Nowhere do I deny that conflicts over material goods such as money
and power are the basic stuff of nonviolent politics, including
ethnic politics; thus I am not attacking all theories with material
causes. Rather, my symbolic politics model, like the competing
rationalist models, takes as given the existence of such disputes and
asks why in some cases these peaceful disputes escalate to extreme
violence.
Because symbolic politics theory is a theory of elite-mass relations,
the broader implications of my argument affect primarily scholarly
understanding of how politicians communicate with the mass public.
Thus, for example, it would challenge theories of the rational
American voter, suggesting that primarily symbolic appeals on issues
such as abortion and school prayer may explain why many Americans
vote against their material interests. It is less applicable to
the essentially distributive ethnic politics in African "hegemonic
exchange" regimes. n2 In other words, symbolic politics theory does
not challenge rationalist bargaining theory where issues are purely
distributive or regulative or when bargaining is confined to elites.
n2. On broader applications of symbolic politics theory, see Stuart
J. Kaufman, Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 218-221. On
hegemonic exchange regimes, see Donald Rothchild, "Collective Demands
for Improved Distribution," in Rothchild and Victor A. Olorunsola,
eds., State vs. Ethnic Claims: African Policy Dilemmas (Boulder,
Colo.: Westview, 1983), pp. 173-193.
WHAT ARE THE INDEPENDENT VARIABLES?
Grigorian's second error is his charge of monocausality. He claims
that my article defends a "belief that ethnic conflicts result from
little more than irrational hatreds rooted in culture." As stated
above, however, my theory identifies six causal variables.
Opportunity, chauvinist mobilization, and security dilemmas are just as
important as myths, fears, and hostility in explaining extreme ethnic
violence according to symbolic politics theory. Thus, according to
the theory, it takes much more than just irrational hatreds rooted
in culture for ethnic tensions to escalate to extreme violence.
This pretense that my theory is monocausal is required for Grigorian's
claim that I am hostile to all theories with structural causes. In
fact, opportunity is a structural variable, and it is a key part of
my theory. My argument is that theories that focus exclusively on
structural and material causes--for example, the rationalist focus
on information failures and commitment problems--are inadequate
for explaining extreme ethnic violence. In the cases I examine,
information failures and commitment problems were unimportant; what
explains the outcomes is a combination of opportunity structure and
the myths, fears, hostility, and chauvinist mobilization at the center
of symbolist theory.
Grigorian's assumption of monocausality also seems to underlie his
objection to the notion that both "hate narratives rooted in ethnic
groups' 'myth-symbol complexes,'" and "competition for territory
and status" contribute to causing extreme ethnic violence. In fact,
all of these factors are comfortably included in symbolic politics
theory, which argues that myths, fears, and hate help to explain why
disputes over material or nonmaterial goods may turn violent.
Grigorian identifies the logic: "power and status maximization are
also consequences of certain narratives." More precisely, symbolic and
emotive factors help to explain where groups seek power and status
maximization--and are willing to fight for these maximal goals--and
where they remain content with compromise on such issues.
Furthermore, status, as distinct from power, is a purely symbolic,
nonmaterial good. If Grigorian agrees that pursuit of status motivates
political behavior, then he accepts the core of symbolic politics
theory.
WHAT EVIDENCE IS NEEDED?
Grigorian asserts that I am guilty of "sins of omission," that is,
of telling the history of the conflicts "incomplete[ly]." He is right:
space limitations prevent any article from mentioning all potentially
relevant historical details. Grigorian does not show that any of the
omitted historical details undermine the argument in the article,
however. And I do discuss the key issues he raises, such as southern
Sudan's desire for autonomy and the Hutu-Tutsi competition for power
in Rwanda.
Grigorian further asserts that there is a methodological problem:
that the analysis fails to account for the possibility that hostile
myths may be the result, not the cause, of the conflicts. Again,
however, he has the dependent variable wrong, and his analysis is too
simplistic. The myths in question are, of course, historical myths
in many cases; therefore the myths, at any particular time, are the
result of the previous conflictual history. But in both case studies,
I identify myths that existed before the outbreaks of violence under
study. For example, I identify myths recorded by Rene Lemarchand
before 1974 as among the causes of the Rwandan violence of 1994. This
timing rules out the possibility that the myths were created by the
politics of genocide in 1993-94. The key Sudanese myths also existed
before the events I use them to explain.
Grigorian later concedes the importance both of the conflictual
history and of the myths, stating: "given the long histories of
[conflict] ... in southern Sudan and Rwanda ... a real puzzle would
have been the absence of hate narratives in their cultures." Again,
his analysis is too deterministic. Anti-American hate narratives
are very weak in Japan and Germany, despite the U.S. leveling of
several of their cities and occupation of their homelands in the
1940s. Most Tatars do not cultivate hate narratives toward Russians
despite centuries of domination and discrimination, and surveys show
that they resist ethnic stereotyping. n3 The symbolist insight is
that myth-symbol complexes vary in the degree to which they justify
hostility toward others, even if past history is conflictual; the
symbolist hypothesis is that the probability of violence varies with
the degree of hostility in the myths.
n3. Roza N. Musina, "Contemporary Ethnosorial and Ethnopolitical
Processes in Tatarstan," in Leokadia Drobizheva, Rose Gottemoeller,
Catherine McArdle Kelleher, and Lee Walker, eds., Ethnic Conflict in
the Post-Soviet World: Case Studies and Analysis (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E.
Sharpe, 1996), p. 202.
WHAT IS A SECURITY DILEMMA?
Grigorian objects to my argument that the predatory motives, not
uncertainties about security, drove the security dilemmas in Sudan
and Rwanda. He states, "It is unreasonable to claim that security
is never a concern," and asserts that the article "rul[es] out
security-driven nationalist mobilization in principle." The first
assertion is right: it would be absurd to claim that security is
never a concern, but nowhere does the article suggest this. Nor does
it rule out security-driven mobilization: I concede that a security
dilemma driven purely by security uncertainties is logically possible,
but it is not what happened in the cases studied.
My argument is that a group's (or state's) security needs can be
defined narrowly or broadly, and the more control a group (or state)
thinks it needs over its neighbors, the more intense the security
competition. This insight--that security dilemmas vary in the degree to
which they are driven by predatory motives--has long been established
in the literature, and has been applied to civil wars by Jack Snyder
and Robert Jervis. n4 I am content to share this "misunderstanding"
of the security dilemma with Jervis and Snyder.
n4. Jack L. Snyder, "Perceptions of the Security Dilemma in 1914,"
in Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein, eds.,
Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1985); and Jack Snyder and Robert Jervis, "Civil War and the
Security Dilemma," in Barbara F. Walter and Jack Snyder, eds., Civil
Wars, Insecurity, and Intervention (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1999), especially pp. 16, 21.
Empirically, Grigorian's argument is that southern Sudan's mobilization
should be understood as "simply a defensive response" to northern
aggression, not as a result of myth-symbol complexes. Again, the
problem is his insistence on a monocausal explanation.
Countermobilization in cases such as southern Sudan are certainly
defensive responses to enemy attack, but they are not "simply" so.
While the Dinka, southern Sudan's largest ethnic group, have a powerful
anti-northern mythology, their Nuer rivals seem to dislike Dinka as
much as they dislike northerners. These myth-symbol complexes help
to explain who countermobilizes and who does not: whereas the main
Dinka reaction to northern attack was defensive countermobilization,
the Nuer split, with some collaborating with the northern-dominated
government and others resisting it.
IS GENOCIDE RATIONAL?
Grigorian's final concern is to defend the rationality of the Rwandan
genocide. First, he asserts that the article claims on page 79 that
"genocide was not a rational preemptive response because it was obvious
that it would not affect the final outcome." There is no such assertion
on page 79; but on page 80, I argue the opposite: genocide was not
a rational preemptive response to the situation in 1994 because it
was obvious that it would affect the outcome--adversely from the
perspective of the genocidaires. If they wished to retain power (and
evidence suggests they did), scattering their army to massacre unarmed
civilians--while allowing the militarily superior Rwandan Patriotic
Front army to drive them out of the country virtually unopposed--was
not a rational act. If such behavior can be called rational, then the
threshold for rational behavior is so absurdly low that it can mean
anything, and therefore it has no analytical power because it excludes
nothing. If rationalism is to be scientific, it must be falsifiable,
and must therefore concede the existence of some political behaviors
that are not rational.
Grigorian later objects to my assertion that de Figueiredo
and Weingast's title, "The Rationality of Fear," is an oxymoron:
some fears are rational, Grigorian argues, resulting "from a correct
assessment of threats and dangers." Here, however, Grigorian confuses
the assessment and response to threat, which may be rational, with
fear, which--according to any dictionary--means entrance into an
emotional state. n5 Although it may be understandable and human to
respond to a threat with strong emotions, the rational response is not
to get scared, but to get ready for self-defense. In a complex society,
the emotional instincts of fight or flight are more likely to disrupt
than to enhance the preparations needed for group self-defense. The
point is important because it is not the calm, rational assessment
of threat, but the emotional state of agitation against a background
of hostile myths, that explains the distorted logic of people such
as Rwanda's genocidaires and their followers.
n5. Emotion, according to Webster's II, is "1.a. a complex, usu.
strong subjective response, as love or fear," whereas fear is "alarm
or agitation caused by the expectation or realization of danger."
Webster's II New Riverside University Dictionary (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1988), pp. 428, 468.
Grigorian's defense of such extreme and false assertions as the
rationality of genocide (which is uniformly self-destructive for
the perpetrating group), and his equation of fear with rationality,
are disturbing. The Rwanda genocide was both depraved by virtually
any modern moral standard and predictably self-defeating for the
genocidaires. It was, in short, stark, raving mad, so the claim that it
was nevertheless rational not only is absurd but also raises serious
moral qualms.
The source of the qualms is that rationalists often assert that the
rational thing to do--with rationality usually defined in selfish,
short-run, and material terms--is also the normatively correct thing
to do. Even though de Figueiredo and Weingast explicitly disavow any
normative endorsement of the Rwanda genocide--they label the plan
for genocide as "diabolical"--the distancing does not quite work. A
logic that simultaneously asserts that rational behavior is normative
and that even monstrous behavior is rational is, at best, vulnerable
to being hijacked by those who would justify the monstrosity. Given
that there is already a literature that seems to show that studying
rational choice theory tends to make students more selfish and
less likely to vote, n6 the moral impropriety of insisting on the
rationality of genocide becomes clearer.
n6. On the link between studying rational choice economics and
selfishness, see Robert H. Frank, Thomas Gilovich, and Dennis T.
Regan, "Does Studying Economics Inhibit Cooperation?" Journal of
Economic Perspectives, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Spring 1993), pp. 159-171; and
Robert H. Frank, Thomas Gilovich, and Dennis T. Regan, "Do Economists
Make Bad Citizens?" Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 10, No. 1
(Winter 1996), pp. 187-192. On the link to depressed voting, see
Andre Blais and Robert Young, "Why Do People Vote? An Experiment in
Rationality," Public Choice, Vol. 99 (1999), pp. 39-55. For evidence
against the selfishness hypothesis, see Bruno S. Frey and Stephan
Meier, "Are Political Economists Selfish and Indoctrinated? Evidence
from a Natural Experiment," Economic Inquiry, Vol. 41, No. 3 (July
2003), pp. 448-462.
CONCLUSION
In sum, Grigorian's letter has confused much and illuminated little
about my article. He repeatedly misstates the argument in the article,
getting the dependent variable wrong and claiming that the explicitly
multicausal argument is somehow monocausal. He inflates other arguments
into straw men, inferring claims the article does not make. In a rare
case in which he correctly states the argument he opposes (that the
"rationality of fear" is an oxymoron), he fails to engage my logic
while implicitly endorsing a position (the rationality of genocide)
that is both empirically false and normatively problematic. This is not
helpful. The way forward for understanding ethnic conflict, and toward
learning how to manage it, is not to insist on the superiority of one's
preferred theory in all circumstances, but to assess in an open-minded
way the strengths and weaknesses of all useful perspectives. Rational
choice theory is one of them. Symbolic politics theory is another.
--Stuart J. Kaufman Newark, Delaware
by Arman Grigorian.
The Center of Strategic and International Studies and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
International Security
Spring 2007
Arman Grigorian is Visiting Assistant Professor of Government at
the College of William and Mary. He thanks Kevin Narizny, Holger
Schmidt, Michael Tierney, and Carola Weil for helpful comments.;
Stuart J. Kaufman.
Stuart J. Kaufman is Professor of Political Science and International
Relations at the University of Delaware.
BODY:
To the Editors:
In his recent article, Stuart Kaufman subjects a set of rationalist
theories of ethnic conflict to strong criticism and proposes
his theory of "symbolic politics" as a superior alternative. n1
Drawing on his earlier work, n2 Kaufman argues that violence between
ethnic groups is best understood not as a consequence of security
dilemmas, informational asymmetries, commitment problems, or elite
manipulation, but instead as a consequence of the content of ethnic
groups' identities, which he calls "myth-symbol complexes." n3 These
complexes are basically mythologized narratives of an ethnic group's
culture and history, which also contain depictions of certain target
groups as victimizers or inferiors (pp. 50-51). Feelings of enmity
are the result of such narratives, according to Kaufman, and violence
is the result of such feelings.
n1. Stuart J. Kaufman, "Symbolic Politics or Rational Choice? Testing
Theories of Extreme Ethnic Violence," International Security, Vol.
30, No. 4 (Spring 2006), pp. 45-86. All further references to this
article appear parenthetically in the text.
n2. Stuart J. Kaufman, Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic
War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001).
n3. Kaufman's argument should be distinguished from arguments that
hold nationalism responsible for ethnic conflicts, where nationalism
is understood as a doctrine demanding congruence of cultural and
political boundaries. Kaufman's argument is not about nationalism in
this more traditional sense, but about nationalism as a narrative.
More generally, it should be distinguished from any theory of group
conflict that sees its causes outside the content of conflicting
groups' identities. The difference is discussed in James D. Fearon
and David D. Laitin, "Violence and the Social Construction of Ethnic
Identity," International Organization, Vol. 54, No. 4 (October 2000),
pp. 845-877.
Kaufman tests this theory against the aforementioned rationalist
theories in the context of the conflicts in southern Sudan and
Rwanda. He concludes that the evidence from these cases strongly
supports his theory, while disconfirming the rationalist ones. I argue
in this brief comment, however, that students of ethnic conflict should
not rush to endorse Kaufman's conclusions. Even if the rationalist
theories in question have problems, they should not be discarded on
the basis of his critique. In fact, endorsing Kaufman's conclusions,
and especially endorsing his proposed alternative, would mean not just
discarding the theories that are the subject of his criticism. It
is not even the rationalist enterprise as a whole that would have
to be jettisoned. The symbolic politics theory has something much
more general in its crosshairs, namely, theories with structural and
material causes. The symbolic politics theory itself is essentially
a somewhat more systematic articulation of a popular, but erroneous,
belief that ethnic conflicts result from little more than irrational
hatreds rooted in culture. n4
n4. Kaufman distances himself from the popularly known "ancient hatred
theory," arguing that "attitudes and even identities in question have
varied over time" (p. 45). What is interesting about the ancient hatred
theory, however, is the part about hatred, not the part claiming that
the hatreds are ancient.
The errors in Kaufman's version of this popular belief can be grouped
into three general categories. First, his empirical test is not
appropriately designed to demonstrate what the symbolic politics
theory implies. Second, Kaufman fails to report evidence that could
potentially disconfirm his theory. Third, he misinterprets some
evidence by arbitrarily redefining certain concepts as consistent
with and related to his theory when they are not.
DESIGN FLAWS
The problems in Kaufman's empirical analysis become apparent even
before combing through the evidence that he presents in the case
studies. They begin with the empirical hypotheses Kaufman derives
both from his theory and the rationalist alternatives, which are
supposed to guide the search for and the analysis of appropriate
evidence. He derives six hypotheses from his theory, dividing them
into two groups. The first group concerns the preconditions for ethnic
war, and the second the mobilization for violent conflict. The first
group includes hypotheses about the existence of "widespread group
myths [that] explicitly [justify] hostility toward or the need to
dominate the ethnic adversary"; the presence of strong "fear[s]
of group extinction"; and the existence of a territorial base (p. 58).
The second group includes hypotheses about "extreme mass hostility
... expressed in the media and ... popular support for the goal of
political domination over ethnic rivals"; use of "symbolic appeals to
group myths, tapping into and promoting fear and mass hostility"; and
the rise of a "predation-driven security dilemma," where the extremism
on one side results in the radicalization of the "leadership on the
other" (ibid).
Even a cursory look at these hypotheses makes clear that the successful
discovery of confirming evidence for any or all of them will at best
demonstrate the existence of hostile myths and hate narratives,
and not that a given ethnic conflict was caused by such myths and
narratives--unless one assumes that the very existence of such myths
and narratives confirms the symbolic politics theory because no other
theory in principle can account for them. That, however, would not be
a justified assumption, because of the reasonable possibility that
causality may run in the opposite direction. After all, it would be
difficult to find any conflict that was not accompanied by rallies
around the flag, remembrances of heroes and martyrs of wars past,
and hateful and hostile rhetoric directed at the opponent. Such
behavior invariably accompanies conflicts, because conflicts
cause it. An argument can also be made that increased nationalist
fervor, attitudes of hate, and contempt directed at an adversary are
instrumental, because intense identification with one's group can be
an effective way of increasing internal cohesion and fighter morale,
n5 while well-conditioned hostility toward or racist contempt for the
adversary may be psychologically necessary to discriminate, persecute,
or kill. This is not necessarily a denial of the possibility that
hatred can cause a conflict. But any claim to that effect should
involve a serious effort to rule out reverse causality. That is what
Kaufman's null hypothesis should be, not whether a particular conflict
was caused by the specific rationalist mechanisms under his scrutiny.
n5. See Barry R. Posen, "The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict,"
in Michael E. Brown, ed., Ethnic Conflict and International Security
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Barry R.
Posen, "Nationalism, the Mass Army, and Military Power," International
Security, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Fall 1993), pp. 80-124.
SINS OF OMISSION
The stories Kaufman tells about the conflicts in southern Sudan and
Rwanda are incomplete. In the case of Sudan, he is silent about the
open and intense dispute over the constitution of the country not
long after it became independent in 1956. The population of the south
insisted on a federal system, while the Arab-dominated government in
Khartoum resisted, insisting on a unitary state. It was the failure
of these negotiations that produced the first southern insurgency,
which had self-determination as its explicit goal, and which led to
a civil war as the Khartoum government refused to concede. n6 The
conflict evolved, of course, creating new problems, grievances,
and demands over the next several decades, but fundamentally it
remained about the degree of autonomy the south would have. The
basis for such a claim is the content of the negotiations that took
place periodically throughout the entire period of the civil war,
and especially the content of the negotiations that eventually led
to a settlement in 2005. n7
n6. Douglas H. Johnson, The Root Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), pp. 30-31.
n7. International Crisis Group, "The Khartoum-SPLM Agreement: Sudan's
Uncertain Peace," Africa Report, No. 96 (Geneva: International Crisis
Group, July 25, 2005).
In the case of Rwanda, Kaufman does not entirely ignore the
long-simmering war that preceded the 1994 genocide, but he says little
about its origins. The issue there was not autonomy or secession for
a minority, but control of the country as a whole and the inability
or the unwillingness of the Tutsi and Hutu elites to agree on a
workable power-sharing arrangement following decolonization. Such
an arrangement would have ended the domination of the majority Hutu
by the minority Tutsi, which had characterized their relationship
since the precolonial period. Also incontrovertible are the facts of
both Hutu mobilization against precisely this system toward the end
of the colonial period and Tutsi resistance against Hutu demands for
majority rule. The tensions produced by these conflicting preferences
eventually exploded into violence in 1959, which resulted in the
exodus of tens of thousands of Tutsis into neighboring countries and
the shift of power from the Tutsi to the Hutu. n8 This was not the
end of the story, however, because the Tutsis who had been forced out
refused to accept either their fate or that Rwanda had come under Hutu
control. Their periodic attempts both to return and to restore their
control over the country, and Hutu resistance against these attempts,
kept the conflict alive in Rwanda for several decades. The conflict
eventually culminated in the 1994 genocide, as a powerful segment
of the Hutu elite concluded that the power-sharing agreement signed
by President Juvenal Habyarimana in 1993 under strong third-party
pressure amounted to handing the country back to the Tutsis. n9
n8. Gerard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 41-54.
n9. See Bruce Jones, "Military Intervention in Rwanda's Two Wars:
Partisanship and Indifference," in Jack Snyder and Barbara F. Walter,
eds., Civil Wars, Insecurity, and Intervention (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1999), pp. 118-121; and Alan J. Kuperman, The Limits
of Humanitarian Intervention: Genocide in Rwanda (Washington, D.C.:
Brookings, 2001), p. 11.
In an attempt to rebut some potential rationalist counterarguments,
Kaufman does acknowledge this, and indeed does not dispute the
conclusion that the agreement Habyarimana signed amounted to handing
the country back to the Tutsis. But he argues that genocide was not
a rational preemptive response, because it was obvious that it would
not affect the final outcome (p. 79). Such an argument, however,
depends too much on hindsight. It also depends on evidence that the
perpetrators themselves clearly saw the strategic futility of genocide,
which Kaufman does not provide.
I should clarify what I am not arguing here. I am not arguing that
the problem of the degree of autonomy in southern Sudan or the
conflicting claims of control over Rwanda were sufficient causes of
the bloodshed in those countries. Problems of political status and
conflicting demands for power are more ubiquitous than civil wars and
genocides. Moreover, the intensity of the conflicts in both southern
Sudan and Rwanda varied over time. Additional variables would be
necessary to explain that variation, as well as the more general fact
that not all potential conflicts of sovereignty and power degenerate
into violence. What is at issue, however, is not only, or mainly,
the causes of violence in ethnic disputes (including those in Sudan
and Rwanda) but the causes of those disputes themselves, which is
primarily what Kaufman's symbolic politics theory is about. n10 And
as such, it does not demonstrate that the conflicts in question would
not have happened in the absence of the hateful mythologies but with
the same sort of conflicting preferences over status and power. Nor
does it demonstrate that the hateful mythologies themselves and their
political deployments were not the consequences of those conflicts.
In fact, given the long histories of domination, exploitation, and
violence that have characterized the relationships of the ethnic
antagonists in southern Sudan and Rwanda, as well as the intense
differences they had over the political status of southern Sudan and
the control over Rwanda, a real puzzle would have been the absence
of hate narratives in their cultures.
n10. Kaufman writes that ethnic myths that justify predatory policy are
"a necessary precondition for ethnic war" (pp. 52-53, 81). His theory
does have two additional variables, fear and opportunity, that are
supposed to explain when these myths are translated into violence
(p. 63). He does not, however, operationalize opportunity in a way
that would allow one to make systematic predictions about when to
expect violence. Any evidence of a myth-symbol complex that fails to
produce violence can always be ascribed to the lack of opportunity,
which makes the theory at least partially immune to criticism. The
opportunity variable plays no role in Kaufman's empirical analysis
anyway. He admits this explicitly by stating that "in Sudan, lack of
opportunity is rarely a constraint on the outbreak of ethnic war" (p.
63), and that in Rwanda, "the Hutu elite obviously had the opportunity
to organize ethnic violence at any time, as long as they held
government power" (p. 73). His treatment of fear has a similar problem:
the operationalization of its intensity seems to depend on the outcome.
SINS OF COMMISSION
One possible answer Kaufman can offer in response to the criticism
above is that he not only accounts for conflicting preferences over
status and power, but that he also emphasizes them as integral to his
theory, as well as in response to the rationalists' tendency to assume
peaceful, status quo preferences. He argues, more specifically, that
"chauvinist leaders always claim to be driven by security motives,
but what makes them chauvinists is that they define their group's
security as requiring dominance over rival groups--which is, naturally,
threatening to the others. If two or more competing groups feel they
need to dominate over the same territory, the result is a security
dilemma: neither group feels secure unless its status needs are met,
but both sets of demands cannot be satisfied at once" (p. 54). Even
assuming for a moment that the claim is empirically justified
and ignoring the misunderstanding of what it means to describe
a situation as a security dilemma, n11 the claim makes Kaufman's
theory inconsistent ontologically. We are being told simultaneously
that ethnic conflicts are the result of hate narratives rooted in
ethnic groups' "myth-symbol complexes" and that they are caused by
competition for territory and status. The fallback position would be
to argue that power and status maximization are also consequences of
certain narratives, but such a move would require a procedure for
ruling out power and status maximization for noncultural reasons,
which is missing from Kaufman's theory. Moreover, given that so many
cultures seem to be afflicted by the same pathology, it is highly
unlikely that culture is the problem. n12
n11. The "dilemma" in the security dilemma is that an actor motivated
by security faces the competing risks of doing nothing and being
attacked or attacking unnecessarily when there are advantages to
attacking first. If actors are motivated by the "need to dominate
over the same territory," there is no dilemma.
n12. Some scholars maintain that the universality of certain behaviors
and patterns is not inherently problematic for the culturalist
paradigm. Alexander Wendt, for example, has framed social identity
theory in culturalist terms despite its universalistic character. See
Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999). As Jack Snyder has pointed out, however,
theories about universal tendencies fit "uneasily with the basic
ontology the cultural theorists propound."
See Snyder, "Anarchy and Culture: Insights from the Anthropology of
War," International Organization, Vol. 56, No. 1 (February 2002),
p. 19.
The more important problem, however, is that dismissing defensive
motives in ethnic conflicts is not justified empirically either.
Kaufman may be correct in arguing that security is not the sole concern
motivating ethnic groups in conflict, n13 but it is unreasonable to
claim that security is never a concern. Note that Kaufman's claim does
not have the form of a convenient assumption to prove some analytical
point. It is fundamentally an empirical claim.
The problem is that the research design of the article, which
consists of two case studies, in addition to passing references to a
couple of other conflicts, is ill suited to demonstrate the veracity
of such a claim. n14 Moreover, the groups that are the targets of
greed-driven, "chauvinist" mobilizations would likely have incentives
to countermobilize and (correctly) justify it as necessary to their
own security, which they invariably do using the same hostile and
hyperpatriotic language. Reactive and defensive mobilization is
actually one of Kaufman's empirical hypotheses (p. 58), but he fails
to realize that ruling out security-driven nationalist mobilization
in principle makes such a hypothesis problematic.
n13. Kaufman may be exaggerating the significance of the assumption,
however. The assumption of benign motives should not be interpreted
to mean literally that greed is never the motive. The idea rather
is to demonstrate that conflicts can occur even when greed is not
the motive. In fact, the possibility of greedy motives is indirectly
built into the security dilemma. See Andrew Kydd, "Sheep in Sheep's
Clothing: Why Security Seekers Do Not Fight Each Other," Security
Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Autumn 1997), pp. 114-154. In addition, there
are rationalist theories of ethnonationalist violence that allow for
motives that are less benign than security seeking. See, for example,
Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, "Greed and Grievance in Civil Wars,"
Oxford Economic Papers, Vol. 56, No. 4 (October 2004), pp. 563-595; and
Benjamin A. Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in
the Twentieth Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004).
n14. For how to pose the question regarding the motives behind ethnic
civil wars correctly, as well as the more appropriate methodology
for answering such a question, see Nicholas Sambanis, "Do Ethnic and
Nonethnic Civil Wars Have the Same Causes? A Theoretical and Empirical
Inquiry (Part 1)," Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 45, No. 3
(June 2001), pp. 259-282. The argument here is not against the case
study method, but rather for its proper employment.
A related tension is evident in the attempt to represent
countermobilizations as consequences of myth-symbol complexes. Even
though the southern Sudanese were the targets of the north's predatory
behavior, Kaufman argues that their mobilization was not simply a
defensive response to it, but was rather due to the Dinka "myths"
about their history of enslavement by the Arabs (pp. 62-63).
Kaufman does not explain, however, why the north's predatory behavior
was not enough for the Dinka to countermobilize, if indeed the Arab
behavior was predatory. Elsewhere Kaufman describes the Azerbaijani
mobilization against the Armenian demands in Nagorno-Karabagh as
mobilization against the "symbol" of Armenian threats. n15 Again,
if the problem had been Armenians' predatory behavior, which is what
Kaufman claims, Azerbaijanis would have mobilized against it with or
without any "symbols" of Armenian threats. This example also makes one
wonder what would not be a symbol or an example of symbolic politics.
n15. See Kaufman, Modern Hatreds, p. 94.
A word is also in order about the treatment of fear in Kaufman's
argument. He defines all fear-driven behavior as irrational,
because fear is an emotion, and goes so far as to claim that the
title of the article by Rui de Figueredo and Barry Weingast--"The
Rationality of Fear"--is an oxymoron (p. 83). Some fears--such as
hypochondria--are definitely irrational. Other fears--such as the
fear of dying in a plane crash--are definitely exaggerations given
the statistical risks. But are no fears rational? Surely some fears
result from a correct assessment of threats and dangers. Kaufman goes
even further with the following claim: "Because the fear is subjective,
a probabilistic understanding of its effect is appropriate" (p. 53). It
is not entirely clear what the aim of this sentence is, but the context
seems to imply that even the concept of uncertainty belongs to the
"symbolist" camp, which, of course, is a bizarre claim. That, however,
does not stop Kaufman from confidently describing all fear-driven
behavior as irrational and chalking up examples of it as supporting
evidence for the symbolic politics theory.
CONCLUSION
Kaufman's article has confused much and illuminated little about the
causes of ethnic conflicts. It has essentially dressed up in academic
garb an old, but mistaken, belief about the fundamental irrationality
and cultural roots of these conflicts. In the process, Kaufman
has failed to identify and rule out the correct null hypothesis;
he has presented narratives of the conflicts in southern Sudan and
Rwanda that fail to account for a number of important facts; and he
has introduced a substantial amount of intellectual contraband into
the symbolic politics theory to account for certain inconsistencies
that it otherwise could not. Students of ethnic conflict, therefore,
should treat Kaufman's findings and conclusions with a healthy dose
of skepticism.
--Arman Grigorian Williamsburg, Virginia
Stuart J. Kaufman Replies:
In "Symbolic Politics or Rational Choice," I argue that the outbreak
of ethnic war in Sudan in 1983 and the Rwanda genocide in 1994 can
best be understood from the perspective of symbolic politics theory.
Symbolic politics theory identifies six causal variables for explaining
extreme ethnic violence: ethnic myths justifying hostility, fears of
group extinction, opportunity to mobilize, extreme mass hostility,
chauvinist political mobilization, and a predation-driven interethnic
security dilemma. The article further shows that rational choice models
fail to account for what occurred in the Sudan and Rwanda cases. n1
Arman Grigorian offers a number of criticisms of this article. In
this response, I identify two key areas in which he misunderstands
my argument and respond to three other general issues he raises.
n1. Stuart J. Kaufman, "Symbolic Politics or Rational Choice? Testing
Theories of Extreme Ethnic Violence," International Security, Vol.
30, No. 4 (Spring 2006), pp. 85-86.
WHAT ARE THE ISSUES?
In Grigorian's view, "What is at issue ... is not only, or mainly,
the causes of violence in ethnic disputes ... but the causes of those
disputes themselves." Based on this assumption, Grigorian concludes
that the point of my article is to advocate the wholesale abandonment
of the rational choice enterprise and of all "theories with structural
and material causes."
Grigorian is wrong, however, about both my dependent variable and my
theoretical target. As stated in the title and throughout the article,
the dependent variable is extreme ethnic violence (i.e., ethnic war
and genocide), not the causes of the initial disputes.
Nowhere do I deny that conflicts over material goods such as money
and power are the basic stuff of nonviolent politics, including
ethnic politics; thus I am not attacking all theories with material
causes. Rather, my symbolic politics model, like the competing
rationalist models, takes as given the existence of such disputes and
asks why in some cases these peaceful disputes escalate to extreme
violence.
Because symbolic politics theory is a theory of elite-mass relations,
the broader implications of my argument affect primarily scholarly
understanding of how politicians communicate with the mass public.
Thus, for example, it would challenge theories of the rational
American voter, suggesting that primarily symbolic appeals on issues
such as abortion and school prayer may explain why many Americans
vote against their material interests. It is less applicable to
the essentially distributive ethnic politics in African "hegemonic
exchange" regimes. n2 In other words, symbolic politics theory does
not challenge rationalist bargaining theory where issues are purely
distributive or regulative or when bargaining is confined to elites.
n2. On broader applications of symbolic politics theory, see Stuart
J. Kaufman, Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp. 218-221. On
hegemonic exchange regimes, see Donald Rothchild, "Collective Demands
for Improved Distribution," in Rothchild and Victor A. Olorunsola,
eds., State vs. Ethnic Claims: African Policy Dilemmas (Boulder,
Colo.: Westview, 1983), pp. 173-193.
WHAT ARE THE INDEPENDENT VARIABLES?
Grigorian's second error is his charge of monocausality. He claims
that my article defends a "belief that ethnic conflicts result from
little more than irrational hatreds rooted in culture." As stated
above, however, my theory identifies six causal variables.
Opportunity, chauvinist mobilization, and security dilemmas are just as
important as myths, fears, and hostility in explaining extreme ethnic
violence according to symbolic politics theory. Thus, according to
the theory, it takes much more than just irrational hatreds rooted
in culture for ethnic tensions to escalate to extreme violence.
This pretense that my theory is monocausal is required for Grigorian's
claim that I am hostile to all theories with structural causes. In
fact, opportunity is a structural variable, and it is a key part of
my theory. My argument is that theories that focus exclusively on
structural and material causes--for example, the rationalist focus
on information failures and commitment problems--are inadequate
for explaining extreme ethnic violence. In the cases I examine,
information failures and commitment problems were unimportant; what
explains the outcomes is a combination of opportunity structure and
the myths, fears, hostility, and chauvinist mobilization at the center
of symbolist theory.
Grigorian's assumption of monocausality also seems to underlie his
objection to the notion that both "hate narratives rooted in ethnic
groups' 'myth-symbol complexes,'" and "competition for territory
and status" contribute to causing extreme ethnic violence. In fact,
all of these factors are comfortably included in symbolic politics
theory, which argues that myths, fears, and hate help to explain why
disputes over material or nonmaterial goods may turn violent.
Grigorian identifies the logic: "power and status maximization are
also consequences of certain narratives." More precisely, symbolic and
emotive factors help to explain where groups seek power and status
maximization--and are willing to fight for these maximal goals--and
where they remain content with compromise on such issues.
Furthermore, status, as distinct from power, is a purely symbolic,
nonmaterial good. If Grigorian agrees that pursuit of status motivates
political behavior, then he accepts the core of symbolic politics
theory.
WHAT EVIDENCE IS NEEDED?
Grigorian asserts that I am guilty of "sins of omission," that is,
of telling the history of the conflicts "incomplete[ly]." He is right:
space limitations prevent any article from mentioning all potentially
relevant historical details. Grigorian does not show that any of the
omitted historical details undermine the argument in the article,
however. And I do discuss the key issues he raises, such as southern
Sudan's desire for autonomy and the Hutu-Tutsi competition for power
in Rwanda.
Grigorian further asserts that there is a methodological problem:
that the analysis fails to account for the possibility that hostile
myths may be the result, not the cause, of the conflicts. Again,
however, he has the dependent variable wrong, and his analysis is too
simplistic. The myths in question are, of course, historical myths
in many cases; therefore the myths, at any particular time, are the
result of the previous conflictual history. But in both case studies,
I identify myths that existed before the outbreaks of violence under
study. For example, I identify myths recorded by Rene Lemarchand
before 1974 as among the causes of the Rwandan violence of 1994. This
timing rules out the possibility that the myths were created by the
politics of genocide in 1993-94. The key Sudanese myths also existed
before the events I use them to explain.
Grigorian later concedes the importance both of the conflictual
history and of the myths, stating: "given the long histories of
[conflict] ... in southern Sudan and Rwanda ... a real puzzle would
have been the absence of hate narratives in their cultures." Again,
his analysis is too deterministic. Anti-American hate narratives
are very weak in Japan and Germany, despite the U.S. leveling of
several of their cities and occupation of their homelands in the
1940s. Most Tatars do not cultivate hate narratives toward Russians
despite centuries of domination and discrimination, and surveys show
that they resist ethnic stereotyping. n3 The symbolist insight is
that myth-symbol complexes vary in the degree to which they justify
hostility toward others, even if past history is conflictual; the
symbolist hypothesis is that the probability of violence varies with
the degree of hostility in the myths.
n3. Roza N. Musina, "Contemporary Ethnosorial and Ethnopolitical
Processes in Tatarstan," in Leokadia Drobizheva, Rose Gottemoeller,
Catherine McArdle Kelleher, and Lee Walker, eds., Ethnic Conflict in
the Post-Soviet World: Case Studies and Analysis (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E.
Sharpe, 1996), p. 202.
WHAT IS A SECURITY DILEMMA?
Grigorian objects to my argument that the predatory motives, not
uncertainties about security, drove the security dilemmas in Sudan
and Rwanda. He states, "It is unreasonable to claim that security
is never a concern," and asserts that the article "rul[es] out
security-driven nationalist mobilization in principle." The first
assertion is right: it would be absurd to claim that security is
never a concern, but nowhere does the article suggest this. Nor does
it rule out security-driven mobilization: I concede that a security
dilemma driven purely by security uncertainties is logically possible,
but it is not what happened in the cases studied.
My argument is that a group's (or state's) security needs can be
defined narrowly or broadly, and the more control a group (or state)
thinks it needs over its neighbors, the more intense the security
competition. This insight--that security dilemmas vary in the degree to
which they are driven by predatory motives--has long been established
in the literature, and has been applied to civil wars by Jack Snyder
and Robert Jervis. n4 I am content to share this "misunderstanding"
of the security dilemma with Jervis and Snyder.
n4. Jack L. Snyder, "Perceptions of the Security Dilemma in 1914,"
in Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein, eds.,
Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1985); and Jack Snyder and Robert Jervis, "Civil War and the
Security Dilemma," in Barbara F. Walter and Jack Snyder, eds., Civil
Wars, Insecurity, and Intervention (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1999), especially pp. 16, 21.
Empirically, Grigorian's argument is that southern Sudan's mobilization
should be understood as "simply a defensive response" to northern
aggression, not as a result of myth-symbol complexes. Again, the
problem is his insistence on a monocausal explanation.
Countermobilization in cases such as southern Sudan are certainly
defensive responses to enemy attack, but they are not "simply" so.
While the Dinka, southern Sudan's largest ethnic group, have a powerful
anti-northern mythology, their Nuer rivals seem to dislike Dinka as
much as they dislike northerners. These myth-symbol complexes help
to explain who countermobilizes and who does not: whereas the main
Dinka reaction to northern attack was defensive countermobilization,
the Nuer split, with some collaborating with the northern-dominated
government and others resisting it.
IS GENOCIDE RATIONAL?
Grigorian's final concern is to defend the rationality of the Rwandan
genocide. First, he asserts that the article claims on page 79 that
"genocide was not a rational preemptive response because it was obvious
that it would not affect the final outcome." There is no such assertion
on page 79; but on page 80, I argue the opposite: genocide was not
a rational preemptive response to the situation in 1994 because it
was obvious that it would affect the outcome--adversely from the
perspective of the genocidaires. If they wished to retain power (and
evidence suggests they did), scattering their army to massacre unarmed
civilians--while allowing the militarily superior Rwandan Patriotic
Front army to drive them out of the country virtually unopposed--was
not a rational act. If such behavior can be called rational, then the
threshold for rational behavior is so absurdly low that it can mean
anything, and therefore it has no analytical power because it excludes
nothing. If rationalism is to be scientific, it must be falsifiable,
and must therefore concede the existence of some political behaviors
that are not rational.
Grigorian later objects to my assertion that de Figueiredo
and Weingast's title, "The Rationality of Fear," is an oxymoron:
some fears are rational, Grigorian argues, resulting "from a correct
assessment of threats and dangers." Here, however, Grigorian confuses
the assessment and response to threat, which may be rational, with
fear, which--according to any dictionary--means entrance into an
emotional state. n5 Although it may be understandable and human to
respond to a threat with strong emotions, the rational response is not
to get scared, but to get ready for self-defense. In a complex society,
the emotional instincts of fight or flight are more likely to disrupt
than to enhance the preparations needed for group self-defense. The
point is important because it is not the calm, rational assessment
of threat, but the emotional state of agitation against a background
of hostile myths, that explains the distorted logic of people such
as Rwanda's genocidaires and their followers.
n5. Emotion, according to Webster's II, is "1.a. a complex, usu.
strong subjective response, as love or fear," whereas fear is "alarm
or agitation caused by the expectation or realization of danger."
Webster's II New Riverside University Dictionary (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1988), pp. 428, 468.
Grigorian's defense of such extreme and false assertions as the
rationality of genocide (which is uniformly self-destructive for
the perpetrating group), and his equation of fear with rationality,
are disturbing. The Rwanda genocide was both depraved by virtually
any modern moral standard and predictably self-defeating for the
genocidaires. It was, in short, stark, raving mad, so the claim that it
was nevertheless rational not only is absurd but also raises serious
moral qualms.
The source of the qualms is that rationalists often assert that the
rational thing to do--with rationality usually defined in selfish,
short-run, and material terms--is also the normatively correct thing
to do. Even though de Figueiredo and Weingast explicitly disavow any
normative endorsement of the Rwanda genocide--they label the plan
for genocide as "diabolical"--the distancing does not quite work. A
logic that simultaneously asserts that rational behavior is normative
and that even monstrous behavior is rational is, at best, vulnerable
to being hijacked by those who would justify the monstrosity. Given
that there is already a literature that seems to show that studying
rational choice theory tends to make students more selfish and
less likely to vote, n6 the moral impropriety of insisting on the
rationality of genocide becomes clearer.
n6. On the link between studying rational choice economics and
selfishness, see Robert H. Frank, Thomas Gilovich, and Dennis T.
Regan, "Does Studying Economics Inhibit Cooperation?" Journal of
Economic Perspectives, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Spring 1993), pp. 159-171; and
Robert H. Frank, Thomas Gilovich, and Dennis T. Regan, "Do Economists
Make Bad Citizens?" Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 10, No. 1
(Winter 1996), pp. 187-192. On the link to depressed voting, see
Andre Blais and Robert Young, "Why Do People Vote? An Experiment in
Rationality," Public Choice, Vol. 99 (1999), pp. 39-55. For evidence
against the selfishness hypothesis, see Bruno S. Frey and Stephan
Meier, "Are Political Economists Selfish and Indoctrinated? Evidence
from a Natural Experiment," Economic Inquiry, Vol. 41, No. 3 (July
2003), pp. 448-462.
CONCLUSION
In sum, Grigorian's letter has confused much and illuminated little
about my article. He repeatedly misstates the argument in the article,
getting the dependent variable wrong and claiming that the explicitly
multicausal argument is somehow monocausal. He inflates other arguments
into straw men, inferring claims the article does not make. In a rare
case in which he correctly states the argument he opposes (that the
"rationality of fear" is an oxymoron), he fails to engage my logic
while implicitly endorsing a position (the rationality of genocide)
that is both empirically false and normatively problematic. This is not
helpful. The way forward for understanding ethnic conflict, and toward
learning how to manage it, is not to insist on the superiority of one's
preferred theory in all circumstances, but to assess in an open-minded
way the strengths and weaknesses of all useful perspectives. Rational
choice theory is one of them. Symbolic politics theory is another.
--Stuart J. Kaufman Newark, Delaware