Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/161512 
Year of Publication: 
2016
Series/Report no.: 
WIDER Working Paper No. 2016/129
Publisher: 
The United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER), Helsinki
Abstract: 
Recent literature has shown that crosscutting social cleavages reduce the likelihood of civil war. This article argues that the same logic does not apply to lower-scale group violence such as riots, which differ in such a way that crosscutting social cleavages should often have the opposite effect, increasing both the frequency and scale of riots. We test this argument by analysing Muslim-Christian violence in the post-Suharto era, combining a new subnational data set of ethno-income and ethnogeographic crosscuttingness with a new and comprehensive subnational data set of violence in Indonesia. Our findings suggest that high ethno-income crosscuttingness, when combined with a high degree of urban anonymity and close living quarters, is a potent setting for inter-group communal violence. We conclude with a discussion of how context matters in understanding the effect of macrostructural variables such as crosscuttingness on violence.
Subjects: 
crosscutting cleavages
ethnicity
riots
violence
Indonesia
Muslim
Christian
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
ISBN: 
978-92-9256-173-4
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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