C&C member Zeynep Bulutgil, Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science, has co-authored an article on “Inequality, elections, and communal riots in India” with Neeraj Prasad, who presented at C&C last term. For the article, the authors looked at the relationship between inequality and mobilizational aspects of violence in electoral settings. They found that when ethnic inequality is low, ethnic identity tends not to be politically salient. In such settings, ethnonationalist politicians use small-scale violent measures aimed at inducing ethnic voting.
In addition to studying the electoral context, the article also sheds light on the broader issue of communal riots and how this specific type of political violence relates to others. In relation to that, the article shows that communal riots do not conform to the standard expectation from studies of large-scale violence that high inequality between ethnic groups increases the likelihood of violence. The authors thus argue that their findings highlight the importance of conceptualizing communal riots, and potentially other types of small-scale political violence, as a separate class of events with their own internal logic.
The article has now been published in the Journal of Peace Research and is available open access here https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00223433221091307