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

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.