The Global Dynamics of Racial and Ethnic Mobilization, by Susan Olzak. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. 288 pp. $55.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-8047-3998-6.

Susan Olzak has done much to expand the boundaries of the sociology of ethnicity by writing this book, which develops and statistically tests general hypotheses about ethnic mobilization using multi-period datasets that are international in scope. She prefaces things by stating that research on ethnic movements has "not generated much in the way of generalizable and testable propositions" (xiii). Such a statement might raise the hackles of those who do comparative historical studies of ethnicity and nationalism, but certainly fits the quantitative race and ethnicity literature.  It is truly rare to see general propositions about ethnicity being subject to world-wide cross-national statistical testing.  It takes a certain amount of courage to move forward in this direction, and it is hoped that the effort will help spawn a larger literature.

The book centers around three main arguments or hypotheses (the terms are used more or less interchangeably in this book): (1) "patterns of ethnic violence ought to differ in peripheral and non-peripheral countries", (2) "the spread of a world culture legitimating human rights for minorities and oppressed groups increases political opportunities for minorities, raises the likelihood of ethnic protest, and exacerbates ethnic tensions within states", and (3) "core countries and countries granting more inclusionary rights to minorities will exhibit ethnic mobilization that is less violent, while exclusionary states will experience significantly more violent outbreaks" (pp. 8-10).   These hypotheses are not the kind one would expect in a quantitative monograph, as they are multi-barreled, somewhat vaguely specified, and overlap in implication and meaning. A number of variables require much further interpretation prior to operationalization, e.g. differing patterns of ethnic violence, spread of world culture, and exacerbated ethnic tensions. Each hypothesis is attributed to one or more theoretical literatures, but there is no concerted attempt by the author to show how the hypotheses together arise from a unified set of theoretical ideas.

Most of the book's chapters are dense with statistical analysis, and Olzak shows great resourcefulness and skill in assembling a diverse collection of data from a large range of sources, primarily ethnic group and event data from the Minorities at Risk (MAR) and Protocol for the Assessment of Nonviolent Direct Action (PANDA) datasets, respectively, but also country-level data drawn from the World Bank and Freedom House publications, as well as from the Polity IV, Uppsala, and Fearon's ethnic fractionalization datasets, among others.   She has identified and made use of a remarkably comprehensive collection of international datasets containing information relevant to ethnicity and collective action.  Since there is no consensus in social science on what constitutes an ethnic group or event, and individual-level data broken down by ethnicity is not available for most countries, questions will inevitably be raised about selection and coding criteria in some of these datasets.  However, Olzak makes a very strong case for global comparative analysis, one that transcends the inherent difficulty of collecting international ethnic data.   

De facto, her two main dependent variables are levels of ethnic violence and nonviolent ethnic protest (which she often refers to by the somewhat unfortunate label "ethnic nonviolence"), and her three main explanatory variables are core/periphery status, integration into the world cultural system, and political inclusion/exclusion of minorities. Other independent variables include population, log GDP, income inequality, political freedom, and level of democracy, among others. Indeed, from looking at the setup of her statistical analysis, one gets some idea of what the main hypotheses are apparently meant to convey more concretely: (1) peripheral status leads to more ethnic violence, (2) integration into the world cultural system leads to more ethnic violence and nonviolent ethnic protest, and (3) political inclusion leads to more non-violent protest and less violence.

However, there is little explicit analysis showing how such operational statements are derived from the content of the original hypotheses; this is left for the reader to infer. Furthermore, Olzak has a tendency to introduce new ad hoc arguments/hypotheses in her empirical chapters that are topically related to but not clearly derived from her main hypotheses or the same underlying assumptions. No attempt is made to systematically itemize these new hypotheses or state them in operational form. This piecemeal presentation makes it more difficult to tell what is being established overall empirically in the book or even in each chapter.

For the first dependent variable, she must contend with the fact that there are already an abundance of theoretical approaches that purport to predict ethnic violence or violence in contemporary developing countries, which is generally thought to be largely ethnic in origin. These include modernization, structural-functional, social psychological, institutional, and rational choice approaches. Each broad approach in turn encompasses multiple theories with differing implications, some of which have been subject to cross-national statistical tests. Given this multiplicity, any regression analysis that seeks to make a strong argument for causality faces the daunting task of including a very large number of variables to represent the major theories or showing why appropriate data were not available.   Instead, Olzak either ignores or touches only briefly on these literatures, and forges ahead without systematically comparing their implications with those of her own approach.  It is true that a few of the control variables in her regressions could plausibly stand in for certain theories within these approaches, particularly modernization.  However, without further discussion and interpretation, the implication for even modernization theories is unclear.

Somewhat puzzlingly, her theoretical discussion about the external causes of ethnic violence centers on world systems theory, even though the approach typically does not place a primary focus on either ethnicity or violence. To justify this choice, she claims that the dependency perspective (which she does not differentiate from world systems) posits that peripheral status implies dependency, which "intensifies the effects of all types of internal conflict" (p. 11). But she does not identify any world systems or dependency theorists who make such sweeping statements, much less those who apply them to ethnic conflict.

Her second dependent variable, non-violent ethnic protest, is not so overdetermined theoretically, and Olzak quite reasonably traces existing explanations to the world polity approach of John Meyer and his associates, as well as approaches to the study of social movements. Her own focus is primarily on social movement approaches that are most consistent with world polity arguments, particularly new social movements and cycles of protest approaches.

Among her main explanatory variables, the indicator for a country's core/periphery status is a categorical variable that is said to be drawn from earlier work by Snyder and Kick on trade and other networks between countries.  The variable is dichotomous in chapters 4 through 6 and 8, but it becomes trichotomous in chapters 7 and 9, with the addition of a semi-periphery category. No explanation could be found for why different indicators are being used in different chapters or how each is calculated.   Perusal of the earlier article shows that it provides a trichotomous, but not a dichotomous, indicator for country status based on blockmodel analysis, and that multiple ways of operationalizing semi-peripheral status are considered.  Also, since the earlier work was published in 1979, one would expect information on how she acquired the contemporary network data that is necessary for the variable to be calculated for more recent time periods.

The main indicator for a country's integration into the world cultural system is a count of memberships in International Non-governmental Organizations, as taken from yearbooks of the Union of International Associations (p. 104-5). There is no explanation of how such a count is derived from yearbook data, e.g. whether it is sufficient that an organization to have a single member in a particular country for the country to be a "member" of the INGO, whether totals are normalized for country population, etc.  Another possible cause for confusion is that, in at least three different tables (pp. 110, 144, 192), the INGO membership indicator is attributed to (Hironaka 2000) rather than to the UIA yearbooks. No clarification is provided, and this particular Hironaka citation unfortunately cannot be located in the book's bibliography.

The final major explanatory variable, ethnic inclusion, is operationalized in multiple ways that are nonetheless conceptually consistent, and is taken from several different sources. These include two measures from MAR, one on formal recognition of group rights and another on ethnic exclusion, as well a more general measure of inclusion using the Summary Index of Freedom from Freedom House.

The statistical analysis takes place across several chapters, and Olzak's choice of statistical techniques shows her broad and sophisticated knowledge of mainstream sociological quantitative methodology. Likewise, both the sheer quantity and variety of analysis and the amount of data collected are quite impressive. As mentioned, the primary dependent variables are ethnic violence and non-violent ethnic protest (variously operationalized), except chapter 8, which looks at internal, interstate, and international warfare. The other empirical chapters use ordinal indicators for violence and non-violent protest, respectively, taken from MAR, while chapter 7 adds event count data for violence taken from PANDA. Ordered logistic regression is generally used for MAR dependent variables (except for chapter 8, which includes a two-stage least-squares regression), and negative binomial regression with a generalized estimation equation approach is used for PANDA.

The patterns exhibited by the data are difficult to characterize in any simple way, and for the most part do not confirm the main hypotheses presented above. For most of the regressions using MAR measures for dependent variables, Olzak runs separate regressions for three different time periods, 1965-69, 1975-79, 1985-89, partly because this corresponds to periodization on the dependent variable measured by the MAR dataset. Within the main regressions on the two main dependent variables, two control variables that show consistent significance across various specifications: log of population size and a measure of previous magnitude of the dependent variable, while log GDP per capita tends to show significance as a predictor for ethnic violence but less consistently for non-violent protest. The explanatory variable for core/periphery status rarely shows significance in the regressions, and this does not survive across time periods or different specifications. The same is true for the variable INGO membership, though it does show very high significance across various specifications when it is lagged and applied to the most recent period of 1989-1995.  Both of the main indicators that are used for the ethnic inclusion show significance for predicting ethnic violence when all periods are pooled, but not in any single period, and while the “group rights” version is significant for the 1975-79 period in predicting nonviolent protest, but not in any other period or the pooled data.

The lack of simple patterns in the data is hardly Olzak's fault, and indeed can provide fertile material for further analysis, but the way she deals with this complexity tends to cause some confusion for the reader. On the one hand, there is a tendency for her to interpret ambiguous evidence in an unambiguous manner. For instance, periphery status is significant in the regression on nonviolent protest for period (1985-89) but not the other periods. She states that this provides "significant support for [the first hypothesis], especially after 1985".  To address the lack of significance in the previous two periods or the pooled data, she adds that "there is some evidence that the impact of structural characteristics does indeed change across time periods" (p. 111), but does not venture to provide the reasons for such changes. A similar pattern arises for the INGO membership variable in the regression on ethnic violence, for which she writes, "As anticipated by the human rights literature . . . during the first wave [1965-69] INGO memberships subdue levels of violence" (p. 123).  No mention is made of the other two waves, in which INGO membership is not significant, or of why the 1965-69 period should be singled out.

Alternatively, there is a tendency to recognize the complexities of the data, but to simply pass them over with vague generalizations. In her conclusion, while noting that there seem to be changes in the effect of peripheral status on violence between the periods prior to and following the Cold War, she simply states that "results were generally consistent with the overall argument that global patterns of integration and diffusion were relevant to ethnic movements" (p. 214).  Analysis is lacking for why they were only sporadically significant, and apparently pointing in different directions depending on period or specification.  Likewise, noting that, in the post Cold War era, core countries tended to have more ethnic violence than peripheral ones, she admits that this was different from what was predicted by her hypotheses. However, she adds that it "is consistent with the view that social movement activity, including violence, diffuses from the core to other parts of the world" (p. 216).  However diffusion cannot be demonstrated by looking at a single time period, and when one looks at earlier periods, peripheral countries in her own data tend to have higher levels of violence than core countries, which runs against this explanation.

At times, she seems to interpret the same theory in contradictory ways. As mentioned, she writes in her introduction that World Systems theory posits that peripheral status intensifies internal conflict, and she adds later that the "world system theory arguments led us to expect that peripheral status would intensify the magnitude of violence" (p. 123). However, in her conclusion, she states that "since the end of the Cold War, core countries have had more ethnic activity, both violent and non-violent. This finding is consistent with the world system perspective, which indicates that core regions provide fertile ground for social movements, cultural forms, and organizational templates that become modular forms of protest adopted in other settings” (p. 220).  Conceivably, she may be trying to make a distinction between magnitude and frequency of violence, but she does not provide any principles from world systems theory that make such distinction.

All in all, Olzak would be better off in dealing with this complexity if she had provided us with a precise, systematic set of theoretical assumptions from which she bases her approach, and from which each of her hypotheses is derived. Then, when some of the hypotheses failed to be confirmed, it would be possible for her to systematically examine the effect of adding, subtracting, or altering particular assumptions to the overall fit of hypotheses with data.  Indeed, in the current volume, we are provided with a very unclear picture of her own theoretical approach to the global study of ethnic mobilization.  Theories are certainly discussed, but in a piecemeal fashion, and their logical connections to each other and the hypotheses are often unclearly laid out, making it difficult to draw larger conclusions for the further development of theory. 

Despite the criticisms set out in this review, it is important to recognize the ambitiousness and difficulty of the task that Olzak set before herself, the undoubted worth of her research goals, and the value in what she has produced. The emphasis that she places on a global view of ethnicity and the distinction she makes between different forms of ethnic mobilization deserve to be influential. The wide range of relevant data sources she has identified and put together will provide a useful resource for future scholars.  Given the amount of prior debate surrounding the causes of ethnic violence in particular, it would have been virtually impossible for anyone to establish the primacy of one particular set of causes or particular theoretical approach.  However, one might ask whether, with a more systematic setting out of its theoretical assumptions and care in interpreting statistical results, the book might have been more successful in moving us towards agreement on the causes of ethnic mobilization worldwide.