Diversity and Diversion: How Ethnic Composition Affects Diversionary Conflict

How does a state’s ethnic composition affect its propensity to engage in diversionary conflicts? Recent empirical work has examined the political conditions under which domestic unrest compels an embattled leader to initiate conflict abroad. We remain largely uncertain, however, of what social or demographic characteristics make states particularly prone to diversionary behavior. This paper takes a first cut at addressing this gap, examining whether a state’s ethnic structure conditions its leader’s response to domestic discontent. Combining the expansive literatures on ethnic politics and diversionary war yields conflicting expectations here. I find that ethnically fragmented states are significantly more prone to initiating diversionary conflicts, and show that this dynamic is driven at least in part by the greater availability of “conflict opportunities” resulting from transborder ethnic kin groups. A brief case study illustrates these dynamics. Forthcoming in International Studies Quarterly ∗The author would like to thank Todd Sechser, Giacomo Chiozza, Susan Allen, two anonymous reviewers and the editorial team at ISQ for their extremely insightful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. He can be contacted at: [email protected] Are leaders of ethnically diverse or cohesive states more likely to respond to domestic political turmoil by lashing out and initiating conflict abroad? Do certain types of ethnic divisions produce stronger diversionary incentives? An enormous amount of theoretical and empirical work has assessed the conditions under which domestic unrest pushes leaders to initiate conflict abroad. But the expansive literature on diversionary conflict has focused on the domestic political or institutional conditions that either affect diversion. The social, cultural, and demographic characteristics that render states more or less prone to diversionary conflict have been completely ignored. This is potentially problematic. If diversionary conflict is essentially intended to quell social unrest, there is every reason to believe that the probability of diversionary behavior is conditioned by domestic social and demographic factors. International conflict may be more likely to bolster domestic political loyalties in states with certain types of populations. Leaders of such states would then more likely to resort to diversionary conflict in response to domestic turmoil. The vast literature on diversionary war has ignored this possibility. I take a first cut at addressing this gap, examining how a state’s ethnic composition affects the likelihood that its leaders will respond to domestic unrest by initiating conflict abroad. I assess three causal pathways that could link ethnic composition to diversionary behavior. First, ethnic composition could affect the probability that a state’s population will “rally around the flag” in response to external conflict. If ethnic diversity impedes such unification, diversionary conflict should be less likely in ethnically fractured states (Coser 1956; Levy 1989). Second, ethnically fragmented states could be more prone to diversion because the existence of numerous transborder ethnic kin groups provides a ready source of “conflict opportunities” for embattled leaders to exploit in when seeking to divert. Third, ethnically divided states may be more domestically unstable, and thus face stronger incentives to resort to risky diversionary conflicts in response to domestic unrest. I find strong support for the conflict opportunities argument. Below, I show that diversionary conflict propensities are significantly greater in ethnically fragmented states. Furthermore, diversionary conflicts disproportionately target states that are ethnically linked to the initiating state. Generally, these results demonstrate that social and demographic conditions significantly affect the likelihood of domestic unrest translating into diversionary conflict. More specifically, they show that ethnic fragmentation at home and transnational ethnic links abroad can significantly increase a state’s tendency toward diversionary behavior. These findings support the notion that diversion requires the availability of pre-existing “conflict opportunities” that leaders can escalate at their convenience. This nexus between ethnic politics and diversionary conflict is further supported with a brief illustrative case study of the 1998 dispute between Turkey and Syria.