National identity, economic interests, and international conflict

    Although many observers agree that identities are important explanatory factors in international relations, the causal link between identities and inter-ethnic or inter-national conflict remains insufficiently understood. Those who support Huntington's 'clash of civilizations' argument claim that increased contacts across identity boundaries is likely to generate increased conflict. In contrast, proponents of globalization argue that such increased contacts, instead, will reduce both differences across identities and the tendency for conflicts to break out over those differences.
    Agent-based modeling provides an ideal approach for examining these questions in a systemtatic fashion. There has been some work in the literature examining the degree to which identity markers may facilitate cooperation, but there has been very little investigation into the mutual casual effects of cultural and economic interaction within and across identity boundaries. This paper begins to address this gap in the literature.
    In particular, I study the conditions under which identities evolve, and components of identities change in relative salience, while simultaneously investigating how and when conflics erupt along, across, or within identity boundaries. My model systematically tests the effects of different degrees of overlap between identity and economci interests, rates of change for each of these factors, and degrees of interaction
within and across identity lines. This makes it possible to subject to a rigorous test the various causal connections posited in the literature between conflict and various features of identities, such as their stickiness, their easy visibility to others, and the fact that they are composed of multiple components, some of which may be shared across populations.


Maurits van der Veen
University of Pennsylvani
Department of Political Science
http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~maurits/
maurits@sas.upenn.edu