DOES GLOBALIZATION BREED ETHNIC DISCONTENT?

Olzak examines how different components of globalization affect the death toll from internal armed conflict. Conventional wisdom once held that the severity of internal conflict would gradually decline with the spread of globalization, but fatalities have remained high. Moreover, leading theories of civil war sharply disagree about how different aspects of globalization might affect the severity of ethnic and non-ethnic armed conflicts. Using arguments from a variety of social science perspectives on globalization, civil war, and ethnic conflict to guide the analysis. Olzak will discuss how economic globalization and cultural globalization significantly increase fatalities from ethnic conflicts, and the sociotechnical aspects of globalization which result in an increase of deaths from ethnic conflict but decrease deaths from non-ethnic conflict, and finally, regime corruption that increases fatalities from non-ethnic conflict, which supports explanations suggesting that the severity of armed conflict is greater in weak and corrupt state. Susan Olzak is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, where she does research on armed conflict, ethnic violence, collective action, and social movement organizations.

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