Welcome to the Blog and Website

Welcome, we are delighted to have you.  

We are using this website to discuss themes from our book, Diversity, Violence, and Recognition: How Recognizing Ethnic Identity Promotes Peace (Oxford University Press, 2020). The book discusses “recognition” strategies to address intergroup inequalities and violence that arises as a result.  In designing constitutions, peace agreements, and institutions to manage conflict, leaders in societies with multiple salient ethnic identities have a choice: they can either recognize ethnic identities explicitly and design institutions that work with these identities (such as ethnic quotas), or they can design institutions in ways that avoid such references to ethnic identity. Our book investigates the reasons that leaders make their choices and the consequences. Generally, we find that recognition leads to more inclusion, less violence, more economic vitality, and more democratic politics than non-recognition, although these effects depend on political conditions, and especially the “ethnic power configuration.” We invite you to peruse the book and other materials for the details of our argument.

We want to do three things with this website. First, we want to make the content of the book and associated materials easy to access.  In addition to links to the book (available in print or electronically), we have links to external media and blog posts that summarize the content, and to an archive of the data used in the book.

Second, we want to support instructors interested in using the book as part of their undergraduate or graduate level courses.  The teaching resources page lists exercises that instructors could use to help students engage with the content of the book in more depth. We’d love to hear from you if you try these ideas or others.

Finally, this blog will allow us to discuss other research as well as current and historical events that speak to the issue of whether “to recognize or not.”  Our book focuses on recognition in high level institutions in countries that recently experienced civil war and high levels of political violence.  However, debates over recognition occur in other settings as well.  Quotas, affirmative action, and other recognition-based strategies can be based on criteria other than ethnicity, such as gender.  The blog gives us an opportunity to broaden the discussion to these other topics. We also envision featuring conversations with scholars and policy-makers -- if you have work that speaks to similar questions, we’d be pleased to hear from you.  

Thank you for your interest.  We are always happy to receive feedback or questions, and for updates, please follow us on Twitter at @cdsamii and @drelisabethking.