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Why African Americans do not rebel? Why is there no armed insurrection of African Americans across the USA, especially in cities and states where they make up almost half of the population? In many parts of the world, ethnic, racial, and religious groups that are much smaller in size, much less disadvantaged socioeconomically and politically, and with relatively fewer historical grievances than African Americans, launched armed insurrections that lasted for decades. The quiescence of African Americans is a momentous puzzle if one subscribes to grievance-based theories of violent ethnic insurgencies (e.g., Gurr 1970). There are more than 40 million African Americans in the USA, which makes them a more populous ethnic group or a potential nation than any Eastern European nation in the European Union. Yet, approximately 40 million African Americans, despite their high level of collective consciousness and multifaceted grievances, did not produce as much armed insurgency as less than three million Basques in Spain have, to expand a comparison Manuel Vogt (4) briefly alludes to. What accounts for this dramatic difference? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been more than five decades since Ted Robert Gurr asked the question, "Why Men Rebel" (1970), in the most popular scholarly work of political rebellion and protest. The subsequent research often focused on grievances as the main motivation behind collective mobilization (Collier and Hoeffler 1998; Fearon and Laitin 2003). Yet the questions of how and why grievances lead to group mobilization and violent or nonviolent conflict onset still attract much scholarly attention. Not all groups with grievances engage in violent and/or nonviolent mobilization. Some do. This is the puzzle Manuel Vogt addresses in this theoretically novel and empirically rich book. He focuses on the type of state birth, i.e. colonial settler or decolonized states, as the backbone of several causal paths from grievances to ethnic conflict onset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]