Territorial arrangements and ethnic conflict management: The paradox that isn’t

Neudorfer, Natascha S., Theuerkauf, Ulrike G. and Wolff, Stefan (2025) Territorial arrangements and ethnic conflict management: The paradox that isn’t. World Development, 185. ISSN 0305-750X

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Abstract

Ethnic civil war, the most common type of war in the 21st century, is one of the biggest challenges for development practitioners and scholars. Like other types of armed conflict, it impedes countries’ economic, social and political development, and there is no consensus on how ‘best’ to solve it. Territorial self-governance has received much attention in efforts to reduce the risk of ethnic civil war, but the academic and policy debates over its effects remain inconclusive. This has reinforced the notion that territorial self-governance is a ‘paradoxical’ institution, which either increases or mitigates the risk of ethnic civil war. In this article, we argue that claims of a ‘paradox’ of territorial self-governance are exaggerated, as they stem from differences in empirical operationalization. We present a systematic overview of the underlying definitions, geographic and temporal scope of quantitative indicators from ten datasets, and compare how they capture aspects of self-rule, shared rule and their legal codification. Using a series of binary time-series-cross-section analyses, we illustrate that different measures of territorial arrangements lead to different results, both regarding the significance and direction of statistical effects. Our findings highlight the need to pay greater attention to the deceptively simple yet empirically fundamental question of which data are being used and why.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Funding information: Stefan Wolff and Natascha Neudorfer would like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) for their generous funding.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	decentralisation,ethnic civil war,ethnic conflict management,measurement,regional authority,territorial self-governance,geography, planning and development,development,economics and econometrics,sociology and political science,sdg 16 - peace, justice and strong institutions ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/3300/3305
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Global Development (formerly School of International Development)
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > The State, Governance and Conflict Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Migration Research Network
Related URLs:	http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?...
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	23 Oct 2024 16:30
Last Modified:	11 Nov 2024 17:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/97165
DOI:	10.1016/j.worlddev.2024.106812

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