Community‐based legislative representation and postcolonial ethnic civil warfare in former British and French colonies

Abstract

Recent research argued that the colonial policy of community-based representation in the legislative assembly strongly increases the risk of postcolonial ethnic warfare in former British and French colonies. This paper delves deeper into the relationship by using an updated dataset that codes the receipt or non-receipt of communal representation for nearly all ethnic groups in former British and French colonies. The results confirm the war-inducing effect of this communalising colonial policy and additionally find that such an effect applies relatively uniformly to groups that benefited from this policy as well as those that were excluded from it. In addition, based on sociological theory and previous research, it was hypothesised that a combination of precolonial receipt of communal legislative representation and postcolonial political exclusion would make an ethnic group particularly prone to postcolonial ethnic warfare. This hypothesis, however, was not supported by the data. This null result has theoretical implications for our understanding of the conditions that give rise to conflict-inducing psychological strain in the field of colonialism and ethnic warfare.

Ethnic empowering policies and postcolonial political exclusion in the British empire: An analysis of ethnic police recruitment and communal legislative representation

“…The strong and consistent results for police representation contrast starkly with communal legislative representation, for which there is no evidence of a meaningful negative association with postcolonial political exclusion. Apart from the just-mentioned fragility of rational-legal institutions in the aftermath of independence, a review of the legislative histories of the former British empire reveals that the institution of communal legislative representation tended not to persist after independence (Jeong, 2023). Among the 13 countries that had communal legislative representation under colonial rule, only five retained this institution after independence (Cyprus, Fiji, India, Jordan, and Myanmar).…”

“…The first focal independent variable, colonial communal legislative representation, was taken from the authors' own survey using a variety of primary and secondary sources (Jeong, 2023). For each ethnic group, these data code whether it received or did not receive communal representation in the colonial legislative assembly.…”

“…The former type of empowerment, which is the focus of the present study, constitutes policies such as ethnic recruitment of the police, army, and civil service (Horowitz, 1985; Killingray & Anderson, 1992; Ray, 2013), communal representation in the colonial legislature (Jeong, 2023; Lange, Jeong, & Amasyali, 2021), the granting of limited ethnic autonomy (Horowitz, 1985; Robinovich, 1979), and ethnic protectionism from trade and internal migration (Horowitz, 1985, p. 158–160). Such ethnicity‐based colonial policies have recently attracted a handful of focused quantitative studies, but their effects on postcolonial ethnic exclusion are not very well attested since most studies of this type seek to explain ethnic warfare rather than exclusion (Jeong, 2023; Lange, Jeong, & Amasyali, 2021; Ray, 2016). One notable exception is Ray (2019), who argued that a higher proportion of coethnics in the officer ranks of the colonial constabulary force weighted by relative population protects against postcolonial ethnic anti‐state warfare by reducing the risk of postcolonial ethnic exclusion.…”