Why Do Ethnic Groups rEbEl? new Data and Analysis

D its fundamental role in legitimizing the modern state system, nationalism has rarely been linked to the outbreak of political violence in the recent literature on ethnic conflict and civil war. to a large extent, this is because the state is absent from many conventional theories of ethnic conflict. indeed, some studies analyze conflict between ethnic groups under conditions of state failure, thus making the absence of the state the very core of the causal argument. others assume that the state is ethnically neutral and try to relate ethnodemographic measures, such as fractionalization and polarization, to civil war. in contrast to these approaches, we analyze the state as an institution that is captured to different degrees by representatives of particular ethnic communities, and thus we conceive of ethnic wars as the result of competing ethnonationalist claims to state power. While our work relates to a rich research tradition that links the causes of such conflicts to the mobilization of ethnic minorities, it also goes beyond this tradition by introducing a new data set that addresses some of the shortcomings of this tradition. our analysis is based on the Ethnic power relations data set (epr), which covers all politically relevant ethnic groups and their access to power around the world from 1946 through 2005. this data set improves significantly on the widely used minorities at risk data set, which restricts its sample to mobilized