Ethnic Identity

This paper asks whether patrimonial hiring in colonial contexts can originate with local bureaucrats rather than political principals. Using newly digitized personnel records from six decades of British rule in Ghana, the authors examine patterns of hiring for African staff and assess whether meritocratic or patrimonial rules prevailed. The study contributes to debates about early state-building by highlighting bureaucrats’ potential agency in shaping personnel choices, especially where political leaders were socially distant from governed communities.

This study asks how white identity varies across individuals and responds to sociopolitical disruptions, using in-depth interviews with white residents of Minneapolis and Saint Paul between 2020 and 2023 to develop a grounded typology of white identifiers. The central contribution is a three-type classification that links variation in awareness and positional framing to the 2020 uprising as an "epistemic disruption" that changed the salience of whiteness for many participants, with different temporal patterns of response.

This paper asks how state-led population displacement shapes long-run political identities, using the historical relocation of Pashtun communities under Emir Abd al‑Rahman in Afghanistan as a case study. The authors reconstruct where tribes were moved and connect those historical settlements to contemporary locations, then analyze novel microlevel survey data to compare political attitudes and identity among coethnic Pashtun communities separated by the resettlement. Their central contribution is evidence on whether and how a state-building resettlement campaign produced durable, regionally rooted political attachments.

Nonviolent tactics are often credited with greater political success than violent tactics, but that pattern hides a powerful moderating factor: ethnic identity. Negative stereotypes that link minority groups with violence lead observers to view minority-led nonviolent campaigns as more violent, increase support for repression, and undermine those campaigns’ chances of success.

When do displaced persons return home after conflict? Drawing on labor migration theories, this analysis shows that positive feelings toward original locations don't always motivate permanent return. Economic opportunities often determine whether displaced individuals become regular visitors or remain in host communities.

This article explains why the presence of coethnics across a border sometimes leads governments to treat that land as part of the homeland—and why it often does not. The key argument is that variation hinges on whether regimes rely on ethnic logics to secure domestic legitimacy. When a regime uses shared ethnicity to win support, ethnicity becomes more politically salient, cross-border coethnic populations become socially meaningful, and claims to lost territory as part of the homeland are more likely to persist.

Recent scholarship suggests that African presidents often target co-ethnics with patronage, especially in non-democratic contexts. This study proposes a connection between presidential ethnic identity change and shifts in citizens' self-identification. Using survey data from fourteen African countries during periods of presidential transitions, the research demonstrates that when there is an ethnic transition (i.e., changing to a different ethnic group), the proportion of respondents identifying with that new ruling ethnic group increases significantly.

How do competitive elections in Africa affect ethnic versus national identity? This paper examines how political competition influences group loyalties, attitudes toward perceived discrimination, and social trust across Sub-Saharan Africa. Using survey data from seventeen countries over fourteen years, we analyze six rounds of data collected during election periods with varying levels of competitiveness.

Ethnicity and national identity significantly influence political alignment.

This study explores how citizens' ethnolinguistic identity influences their foreign policy preferences toward Russia and the EU, particularly in regions with varying trade dependencies.

New research examines the relationship between ethnic inequality and identity strength across Sub-Saharan African nations.

This article examines how rapid urbanization affects ethnic identity politics among rural-urban migrants in India. Drawing on an ethnographic survey experiment with N=4,218 poor migrants, it challenges conventional predictions about whether class or ethnicity shapes their social divisions.