What Motivates Ethnic Conflict? Evidence from Ethnically Motivated Violence in the UK

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Ethnically motivated violence and harassment harm people and communities. Understanding the reasons behind ethnically motivated violence and harassment is key to designing policy to impact on ethnic violence and improve community wellbeing.Ethnic violence is violence perpetrated against a person because of their ethnicity. There are three possibilities which seem immediately obvious candidates as motivation for ethnic violence within a community: dislike of those who are different, where an individual gets displeasure simply from living in the same area as those from another ethnic group; competition over control of a public good, where, for instance, violence is perpetrated to dissuade another ethnic group from influencing the type of amenities in the local neighbourhood, or the cultural make-up of the neighbourhood, including types of shops and places of worship; and competition over divisible resources, where, for example, ethnic violence is perpetrated to dissuade other ethnic groups from using social housing or gaining employment in the area.We seek to better understand the causes of and motivation for ethnic violence and harassment, both in the UK and elsewhere. We construct an economic model in which individuals make decisions both about the local area in which to live and the extent to which they participate in ethnic conflict in their local area. Having established possible motivations for ethnic violence, we assume an individual chooses where to live and his level of violence and harassment against other ethnic groups in his local area based on these different motivations. The individual also takes into account the possibility that different local areas may have different values when making his decision, for example one area may have more jobs or better housing.Which motive is driving ethnic violence and harassment will affect the level of violence and harassment in a given area, as well as how ethnic violence interacts with factors such as the relative sizes of the various ethnic groups, job supply, housing supply and the wealth of an area. In this way we will use the economic framework to understand how we can tell one motivation for ethnic violence from another. For example, the framework will tell us what we should expect to see in a diverse community if competition over divisible resources is driving ethnic violence.We will use data on ethnic violence in the UK by local authority area, data on the ethnic composition of each local authority area, as well as data on economic resources (such as job supply and social housing) to examine what we see happening in communities in the UK. We want to understand what we find in our data on the UK in light of the predictions of the economic framework. In light of these findings we would hope to identify potential policy decisions capable of enhancing community wellbeing.