Hate Narratives and Ethnic Conflict
To the Editors:
In his recent article, Stuart Kaufman subjects a set of rationalist theories of ethnic conflict to strong criticism and proposes his theory of "symbolic politics" as a superior alternative.1 Drawing on his earlier work,2 Kaufman argues that violence between ethnic groups is best understood not as a consequence of security dilemmas, informational asymmetries, commitment problems, or elite manipulation, but instead as a consequence of the content of ethnic groups' identities, which he calls "myth-symbol complexes."3 These complexes are basically mythologized narratives of an ethnic group's culture and history, which also contain depictions of certain target groups as victimizers or inferiors (pp. 50–51). Feelings of enmity are the result of such narratives, according to Kaufman, and violence is the result of such feelings.
Kaufman tests this theory against the aforementioned rationalist theories in the context of the conflicts in southern Sudan and Rwanda. He concludes that the evidence from these cases strongly supports his theory, while disconfirming the rationalist ones. I argue in this brief comment, however, that students of ethnic conflict should not rush to endorse Kaufman's conclusions. Even if the rationalist theories in question have problems, they should not be discarded on the basis of his critique. In fact, endorsing Kaufman's conclusions, and especially endorsing his proposed alternative, would mean not just discarding the theories that are the subject of his criticism. It is not even the rationalist enterprise as a whole that would have to be jettisoned. The symbolic politics theory has something much more general in its crosshairs, namely, theories with structural and material causes. The symbolic politics theory itself is essentially a somewhat [End Page 180] more systematic articulation of a popular, but erroneous, belief that ethnic conflicts result from little more than irrational hatreds rooted in culture.4
The errors in Kaufman's version of this popular belief can be grouped into three general categories. First, his empirical test is not appropriately designed to demonstrate what the symbolic politics theory implies. Second, Kaufman fails to report evidence that could potentially disconfirm his theory. Third, he misinterprets some evidence by arbitrarily redefining certain concepts as consistent with and related to his theory when they are not.
Design Flaws
The problems in Kaufman's empirical analysis become apparent even before combing through the evidence that he presents in the case studies. They begin with the empirical hypotheses Kaufman derives both from his theory and the rationalist alternatives, which are supposed to guide the search for and the analysis of appropriate evidence. He derives six hypotheses from his theory, dividing them into two groups. The first group concerns the preconditions for ethnic war, and the second the mobilization for violent conflict. The first group includes hypotheses about the existence of "widespread group myths [that] explicitly [justify] hostility toward or the need to dominate the ethnic adversary"; the presence of strong "fear[s] of group extinction"; and the existence of a territorial base (p. 58). The second group includes hypotheses about "extreme mass hostility . . . expressed in the media and . . . popular support for the goal of political domination over ethnic rivals"; use of "symbolic appeals to group myths, tapping into and promoting fear and mass hostility"; and the rise of a "predation-driven security dilemma," where the extremism on one side results in the radicalization of the "leadership on the other" (ibid).
Even a cursory look at these hypotheses makes clear that the successful discovery of confirming evidence for any or all of them will at best demonstrate the existence of hostile myths and hate narratives, and not that a given ethnic conflict was caused by such myths and narratives—unless one assumes that the very existence of such myths and narratives confirms the symbolic politics theory because no other theory in principle can account for them. That, however, would not be a justified assumption, because of the reasonable possibility that causality...
