Ethnic Violence and Political Arenas: Explaining the Formation of Conflict Networks in three Sub-Saharan African Countries

Abstract

This paper explores the conditions under which violence occurs between ethnic groups in Sub-Saharan Africa. While the rest of the world experiences decline in intra-state violence, the rates in Sub-Saharan Africa continue to increase. As the explanatory power of network analysis became known across the social sciences, it still has experienced extraordinarily little application to ethnic violence. Network analysis overcomes the selection bias and unit of analysis problems that plague many previous studies, including the tendency in the existing literature to only examine ethnic groups with national political relevance. This study visualizes ethnic violence networks in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Sudan and employs an exponential random graph model (ERGM) to explain the formation of ethnic violence networks. Drawing on hypotheses proposed by Daniel Posner, the ERGM examines the relative size of ethnic groups and the number of shared subnational political arenas in which the ethnic groups must compete for political control. The results indicate that violence between ethnic groups is more likely as the number of shared subnational political arenas increase, with important implications for how states draw their subnational political boundaries.