“Environmental Stress, Political Institutions & Social Conflict: Evidence from South Asia.”
This project, funded by a multi-year grant from the US National Science Foundation, investigates how water access and local political institutions interact to shape social conflict in India and Pakistan. The investigators leverage discontinuities in historical and contemporary political institutions across carefully-selected subnational – district and subdistrict – and national boundaries and a range of methodological tools including ethnographic work and a survey experiment to facilitate a strong causal inference. They develop a theoretical framework that builds on the existing literature and their recent work to offer a nuanced understanding of the role of historical and contemporary political institutions in moderating the effects of environmental stress on social conflict. In theorizing about this relationship, the principal investigators challenge the dominant perspective on the role of colonial institutions and highlight the importance of distinguishing between inter- and intra-ethnic divisions. They offer a rigorous empirical framework that analyzes data at three different levels – district, subdistrict and individual – within carefully controlled geographical settings to give us greater confidence in the findings. While the district level analysis covers all districts of India and Pakistan, the sub-district level analysis of areas involves select clusters of geographically contiguous provinces in these countries including subdistricts formerly included in the British India province of the Punjab, which was divided between them in 1947. For district and subdistrict analysis, the project will generate: a) large-scale, high-resolution data on the entire, accentuated-attenuated, social conflict spectrum in South Asia by gathering data on a variety of attenuated manifestations of violence organized around religion- and lineage-based identities; and, b) highly-localized data on water security and political institutions across the two countries. To further validate their findings and clearly identify causal mechanisms, the investigators will benchmark the results of district and subdistrict analysis against the information obtained from a forced-choice conjoint experiment deployed in 240 carefully selected primary census units in India and ethnographic work conducted in a sub-set of these communities.
“Colonization, Religion and Ethnicity: How Colonial-era Religious Changes Shaped Ethnic Politics in Post-colonial India.”
This project builds upon the argument advanced in my book project and the literature on social capital to argue that the characteristics of the network of social relations of an ethnic group can help explain the distribution of inter- and intra-ethnic trust across its population. I argue that the network of social relations constituting an ethnic group has strong imprints on the practices, organizations and institutions associated with the particular religious sect or mission it experienced over the course of last millennium. An individual’s or community’s location in this network could shape their attitude and behavior towards both co-ethnics and outsiders. The approach is to identify breaks in the network of social relations of an ethnic group to identify ‘boundaries of trust’ in the network, which may or may not be coterminous with ethnic or religious boundaries. This project is supported by a grant from the Global Religion Research Initiative (GRRI) at the University of Notre Dame. I have designed and administered a large survey experiment involving over 3,360 participants, conducted in eight different languages across 250 village communities, covering some of the most inhospitable and insurgency-affected areas, in the Indian state of Manipur.