Migration and the Ethnoreligious Hate Crime in Russia: Risk Profiles 2000-2010.

The relationship between demographic change and ethnic violence has been one of the basic research questions in social sciences and the one that has not been studied systematically in comparative settings. The proposed paper will present new research on this question funded by the grants of the National Science Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. It focuses on Russia where ethnoreligious hate crime has been an increasingly prominent social problem since the late 1990s. The study examines demographic, socioeconomic, and policy contexts that give rise to violence such as skinhead riots and street raids by chain-and-rod wielding toughs; torchlight marches and attacks on mosques and synagogues; murders and beatings of foreign residents and diplomats; desecration of Jewish cemeteries and intimidation of Chinese traders by whip-cracking Cossack gangs. Explanations of these events by Russian experts have evoked well-known social science theories emphasizing rebellious youth subculture, rapid social change, prejudice, and political "normalization of violence." These factors, however, fail to explain regional variation in hate crime rates across Russia's provinces, cities, and counties over time. Addressing important gaps in empirical and theoretical knowledge, the proposed study will for the first time model and test the combined effects of migration and demographic trends on ethnoreligious violence and militant interethnic hostility in the Russian Federation. Using negative binomial regression modeling, the paper finds significant support for new hypotheses derived from an adaptation to the Russian context of the multicausal "defended neighborhood" model of hate crime developed and the security dilemma model of anti-migrant hostility. Even when data is aggregated by large units (provinces) and when most regions are ethnically homogenous, negative binomial estimates reveal that ethnoreligious hate crime rates tend to be higher when more migrants arrive in predominantly Slav regions. And in ethnically heterogeneous regions the number of hate incidents is likely to decrease as the proportion of migrant group rises (with the exception of East Asians). The paper reveals that Russian regions with over 95% population Slav are likely to be at significant risk of intense Slav-Caucasus ethnic violence in the coming decade (resembling perhaps Northern Ireland in the early 1970s) if the proportion of Caucasus ethnic groups there increases by more than 5% and other conditions are held constant. Even higher rates of Slav-East Asian violence are predicted for mixed Slav-non-Slav regions in which the proportion of East Asians over a decade may increase by 2-3%. And contrary to conventional wisdom, the model showed that more hate violence is likely in provinces with lower unemployment and higher education and income levels--not because of the underlying socioeconomic conditions represented by these indicators, but because they are also proxies for non-Slav in-migration levels that may not have been captured completely by the census data. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]