The ETHNICGOODS team made significant contributions to ongoing debates on nation-building at this year’s ASA and APSA conferences.
At the American Sociological Association (ASA) Annual Meeting in Montreal (August 9-13), our Post-Doctoral researcher Emre Amasyali presented two forthcoming papers penned by the ETHNICGOODS team. On August 11, Amasyali introduced “Varieties of Nation-Building: A Conceptual Framework and New Dataset” at Roundtable 30635. The paper presents the Nation-Building Policies (NBP) dataset, the main output of the ETHNICGOODS project. It also outlines and explores four key ideational approaches to nation-building—assimilation, accommodation, segregation, and eradication—that the dataset seeks to test.
As part of the same roundtable, Amasyali also presented “Closer to the Source: Examining the Role of Cultural Status Inequalities in Civil Wars”. This study draws on the forthcoming NBP dataset, which collects data on religious and linguistic policies of independent nation-states. By focusing on government policies that can either escalate or mitigate conflict, the research aims to establish a theoretical link between discrimination and group conflict behavior, offering new insights into the dynamics of civil wars.
At the American Political Science Association (APSA) Annual Meeting in Philadelphia (September 5-8), Principal Investigator Matthias vom Hau continued the dialogue. On September 5, he delivered the same paper on cultural status inequalities and civil wars, previously introduced by Amasyali at ASA.
On September 7, vom Hau presented another forthcoming publication, “The Information Capacity of States, Ethnic Diversity, and Social Development”. This effort, inspired by the research behind ETHNICGOODS, examines how state informational capacity influences ethnic identity patterns and diversity. It provides insights into how historical differences in state formation affect ethnic heterogeneity, and challenges the assumption that ethnic fractionalization always hinders development.
We are grateful for the opportunities to present our research and receive valuable feedback. With summer behind us, we’re entering the final stages of our project and getting ready to unveil the NBP dataset that we’ve been carefully developing over the past years.
