Search

Ethnicity is frequently posited as an important factor in civil violence and other political contexts. Despite the attention that ethnicity receives, its effects depend on an important, but mostly ignored, assumption that ethnicity is identifiable within and across groups. There is likely considerable variation in peoples’ abilities to identify each other. Certain individuals within groups might be better at identifying others’ ethnicities; further, different types of information might aid identification better. We contend that the strength of an individual’s ethnic identity influences her ability to identify others correctly. We test this argument using an experiment in the Eastern Cape of South Africa in which individuals attempted to identify members of the major black ethnic groups. We find that the average individual struggles to identify ethnicity correctly in many conditions. Individuals with a stronger identity, however, are often better at correctly identifying the ethnicity of others relative to the average individual. When receiving contradictory information, individuals with stronger identities were sometimes deceived more easily than others. These results have implications for a diverse set of studies relying on the identifiability assumption. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines civil war resolution as a process comprised of multiple interdependent stages. It engages directly the idea that peace emerges only as a process comprised of battle, negotiation, agreement, and implementation of an agreement. I hypothesize that events at earlier stages of the peace process have implications for later stages, but not always in the same ways. Drawing on bargaining models of war, I consider how two factors that might prevent successful bargaining—stalemates and the number of actors—can encourage cooperation early in a peace process but impede lasting cooperation at later stages. Using a nested dichotomies statistical approach to capture interdependence, I find support for the argument that stalemates and the number of actors have different effects depending on the stage of the peace process. The results substantiate the need in theoretical and policy work to consider peace as an interdependent, sequential process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]