(Canceled) IBS Speaker Series: Alexandra Siegel

Update: This event is cancelled.

Title: The Ethnicization of Conflict

Bio: Alexandra Siegel is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, a faculty affiliate of NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics, and a faculty affiliate of Stanford’s Immigration Policy Lab. She received her PhD in Political Science from NYU in 2018. Her research uses social media data, network analysis, and experiments—in addition to more traditional data sources—to study mass and elite political behavior in the Arab World and other comparative contexts. She is a former non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institute, Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a former CASA Fellow at the American University in Cairo. She holds a Bachelors in International Relations and Arabic from Tufts University.

Abstract: Ethnic conflicts are often seen as especially violent and intractable. But how and why do some conflicts become “ethnic”? We develop a new conceptual and methodological framework for studying the ethnicization of conflict.  Drawing on constructivist perspectives on ethnic identity formation and change, we conceptualize ethnicization as a framing process in which ethnic, frames, narratives, and interpretations of conflict spread and become more prevalent over time.  Leveraging social media data and computational methods, we develop dynamic granular measures of the shifting salience of ethnic and non-ethnic identities during conflict.  Applying this framework to civil conflicts in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, we systematically describe temporal and spatial variation in the ethnicization of conflict. Social network analysis also enables us to identify key actors driving ethnicization inside and outside of the conflict zones. By integrating constructivist perspectives on ethnic identity into the quantitative literature on political conflict and violence, and providing a scalable and generalizable approach to measuring ethnicization, this work provides a valuable contribution to the study of contemporary ethnic politics