Explaining the Occurrence and Dynamics of Dominant Group Violence
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Explaining the Occurrence and Dynamics of Dominant Group Violence: Uncertainty, Threat, and Israeli Settler Violence in the West Bank Yehuda Magid Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Political Science, Indiana University May 2019 Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Doctoral Committee _____________________________________ Karen Rasler, PhD _____________________________________ William Thompson, PhD _____________________________________ Eitan Alimi, PhD _____________________________________ Noam Zadoff, PhD _____________________________________ Ore Koren, PhD _____________________________________ Cyanne Loyle, PhD May 2, 2019 ii Dedication To my wife Danielle for her unyielding love, support, encouragement and understanding. iii Acknowledgements I cannot possibly express my level of gratitude to my thesis advisor and mentor Professor Karen Rasler for her endless support and encouragement throughout my graduate career. This project would not have been possible without Karen’s rigorous teaching, our extended discussions, and her innumerable reviews of my term papers, article drafts, and dissertation chapters. I also want to thank my father, Professor Shaul Magid, for all of his support and guidance throughout my graduate education. His critiques and suggestions have vastly improved my research and his support was instrumental in my ability to produce this dissertation. Thank you to Professor Eitan Alimi, Professor Ore Koren, Professor Bill Thompson, Professor Noam Zadoff, and Professor Cyann Loyle for their willingness to sit on my dissertation committee and for their valuable feedback at various stages of the dissertation process. Finally, I want to express my appreciation to the Borns Jewish Studies Program for their generous funding, which made the fieldwork for this dissertation possible. iv Yehuda Magid Explaining the Occurrence and Dynamics of Dominant Group Violence: Uncertainty, Threat, and Israeli Settler Violence in the West Bank Why do dominant ethnic groups perpetrate violence against ethnic minorities and why does this violence vary in its frequency, severity, target choice, and level of popular participation over time? Addressing the first question, I argue that existing explanations of dominant group violence lack a unifying theoretical framework that explains why dominant group violence occurs. In order to address this lacuna, I propose an explanation of dominant group violence founded on the social-psychological concept of uncertainty that can account for a range of existing explanations. I build on the theoretical distinction between physical and social threat in order to explain the dynamic nature of dominant group violence. I posit that physically threatening events tend to trigger relatively frequent and severe attacks against minorities by a relatively large proportion of the dominant group. In contrast, socially threatening events tend to trigger attacks against symbolic sites representing the culture and identity of ethnic minorities by a relatively small and intolerant subsection of the population. In order to test my theoretical arguments, I employ a mixed methods research design relying on the West Bank as the primary case of analysis. The quantitative portion of my analysis uses both time-series regression and district-level descriptive analyses of an original dataset of contentious activities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem (2010-2015). In order to examine the mechanisms underlying the quantitative results further, I conduct a historical case study of anti- v Arab violence by Jewish civilians in Israel-Palestine from 1929 through 2015. The qualitative analysis builds on secondary literature and approximately 50 original interviews with Israeli settlers conducted in the West Bank in 2016 and 2017. This research helps to bridge existing explanations of dominant group violence by developing a unifying theoretical framework and adds nuance to theoretical arguments linking threat and political violence. The results of the study suggest that as long as ethnonationalist sentiments remain entrenched, attempts to resolve ethnic conflict that do not fundamentally alter horizontal political inequalities are likely to exacerbate rather than moderate intercommunal conflict. _____________________________________ Karen Rasler, PhD _____________________________________ William Thompson, PhD _____________________________________ Eitan Alimi, PhD _____________________________________ Noam Zadoff, PhD _____________________________________ Ore Koren, PhD _____________________________________ Cyanne Loyle, PhD vi Table of Contents Introduction: .................................................................................................................................... 1 Dominant Group Violence: Conceptualizing the Object of Study .............................................. 5 Dominant ethnic groups: ......................................................................................................... 5 Ethnic Violence: ...................................................................................................................... 8 Dominant Group Violence: ..................................................................................................... 9 Selecting a theoretical approach for explaining dominant group violence: .............................. 13 Ideational theories: ................................................................................................................ 13 Behavioral Theories: .............................................................................................................. 14 Relational Theories: ............................................................................................................... 16 The Case: Jewish settler violence.............................................................................................. 18 The structure of the dissertation: ............................................................................................... 26 Chapter 1: Ethnic Democracy, Structural Uncertainty, and the Occurrence of Dominant Group Violence ........................................................................................................................................ 29 Existing research on regime type and domestic conflict: .......................................................... 33 Defining ethnic-democracy: ...................................................................................................... 38 Hegemonic ideology: ............................................................................................................. 39 Segmented rule: ..................................................................................................................... 43 Democratic governance: ........................................................................................................ 44 How ethnic democracies produce minority dissent: ................................................................. 49 Why governments in ethnic-democracies employ a mixed strategy of conflict management: . 55 How the government’s mixed strategy of conflict management produces dominant group violence: .................................................................................................................................... 61 Conclusion:................................................................................................................................ 65 Chapter 2: Threat and the Dynamics of Dominant Group Violence ............................................ 67 Threat and political violence: dissidents, governments, and dominant ethnic groups .............. 71 An interactive dynamic approach:............................................................................................. 75 Threat and the dynamics of dominant group violence: ............................................................. 81 Physical threat: ...................................................................................................................... 83 Social threat: .......................................................................................................................... 90 Relative effects of physical and social threat: ....................................................................... 96 Conclusion:.............................................................................................................................. 103 vii Chapter 3: Research Design ........................................................................................................ 104 Quantitative study of ethnic violence: ..................................................................................... 108 Introducing the West Bank Contentious Events Dataset (WBCED): ..................................... 113 A rough test of data reliability: ............................................................................................... 133 Qualitative analysis: ................................................................................................................ 136 Conclusion:.............................................................................................................................. 138 Chapter 4: Data Analysis ...........................................................................................................