Ethnic Mobilization and the Type of State Birth: Why Do Grievances Lead to Violent or Nonviolent Uprisings?

Abstract

It has been more than five decades since Ted Robert Gurr asked the question, “Why Men Rebel” (1970), in the most popular scholarly work of political rebellion and protest. The subsequent research often focused on grievances as the main motivation behind collective mobilization (Collier and Hoeffler 1998; Fearon and Laitin 2003). Yet the questions of how and why grievances lead to group mobilization and violent or nonviolent conflict onset still attract much scholarly attention. Not all groups with grievances engage in violent and/or nonviolent mobilization. Some do. This is the puzzle Manuel Vogt addresses in this theoretically novel and empirically rich book. He focuses on the type of state birth, i.e. colonial settler or decolonized states, as the backbone of several causal paths from grievances to ethnic conflict onset.