Why do peripheral minorities sometimes identify with their country and sometimes with their ethno-regional group? When will their identification with a neighboring country be stronger than their national identity? Weak national identification in peripheral regions can contribute to separatism and irredentism. Reclaiming lost parts of the homeland has motivated enduring conflicts between China and Taiwan, North and South Korea, Greece and Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Serbia and Croatia, Somalia and Ethiopia, and in other cases. Irredentism has been a feature of major wars, including Germany's and Hungary's land grabs prior to and during World War II. Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 was a reminder that irredentism is as important today as it is understudied. Irredentism takes different forms, including indirect intervention by neighboring states who use their co-ethnics across the border to destabilize regional competitors by sowing conflict. Studies have shown that the presence of cross-border kin groups is a risk factor for civil war.Footnote 1 Therefore, understanding the conditions under which governments can induce the loyalty of peripheral minority populations is critical for the study of separatism, irredentism, and nation building.
Affective factors—the salience of ethnic versus national identification—are important determinants of these conflict processes. There is no consensus on the causes of separatism and irredentism, but most studies focus less on grievances and more on factors that affect the feasibility of rebellion.Footnote 2 Peripheral areas can be at greater risk for separatism because of interference by co-ethnic populations across the border, because greater physical distance from the center might impede the penetration of these areas by state institutions, or because these areas are more likely to be dominated by territorially concentrated ethnic minorities. These factors could also impact affective determinants of separatism because they contribute to a sense of cultural distance between center and periphery. The greater that distance, the lower the national identification of peripheral populations and the more likely it is for ethnic conflict to emerge.Footnote 3 Regional adversaries of the state can benefit from that distance by supporting their co-ethnics or co-religionists across the border to fuel ethnic conflict.Footnote 4 In response, states might react by using violent repression of ethnic minorities who make claims for self-determination when these claims serve the interests of regional adversaries. Is violent repression an effective strategy to suppress challenges to state authority by peripheral groups, or is it more likely to weaken those groups' loyalty to the state and the nation?
We contribute to the understanding of peripheral ethnic conflicts by studying the determinants of ethnic versus national identification in the Kashmir Valley in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, one of the most well-known yet understudied cases of irredentist and separatist conflict (we do not cover the Hindu-dominated Jammu, Buddhist-dominated Ladakh, or Pakistan-administered Kashmir regions).Footnote 5 Kashmir has been at the center of an enduring rivalry between India and Pakistan since the late 1940s. Insurgency and government crackdown has left over 60,000 people dead. Data gathering and rigorous academic scholarship have been rare. We explore the relationship between violence and social identification in this ongoing separatist conflict using novel survey experimental methods that allow us to go some way in resolving the selection issues that mar prior observational studies on the link between violence and ethnic identification.
While the literature assumes that ethnic violence reifies ethnic cleavages, no previous study has measured the effect of violence exposure on support for irredentism in a realistic setting during an active conflict. We provide such an analysis using data from face-to-face interviews with a large sample of Kashmiris while randomizing exposure to videos of actual ethnic violence and police repression of protests. This allows us to study how violence exposure affects the way Kashmiris feel about the Indian state and how they respond to Pakistani irredentism. Drawing inspiration from social identity theories of intergroup conflict, we also test whether integrative institutions reduce social distance between Kashmiris and the Indian state and if material or psychological benefits that arise from being part of a high-status nation with a growing economy can mitigate the effects of large psychological distance.Footnote 6
A large historical, case-based literature exists about the Kashmir conflict,Footnote 7 but there have been few theoretically motivated quantitative studies that aim to understand the determinants and dynamics of ethnic and national identification at the micro level. The existing literature is equivocal on whether a strong ethno-regional identity weakens the national identity.Footnote 8 Previous empirical studies suggest that a tradeoff between ethnic and national identity exists under some conditions,Footnote 9 but there are several open questions. Can the Indian state use policies to weaken Kashmiri ethno-regional identity as a strategy to reduce the intensity of separatist conflict in the region? Are integrationist policies—recruiting Kashmiris in the armed forces—likely to reduce the psychological distance Kashmiris feel toward India? Can India's growing international status make Kashmiris more likely to identify as Indian? Are Pakistan's overtures more likely to be accepted if India uses repressive tactics? We address all these questions, which are central to the specifics of the Indo-Pakistani conflict, but also inform the broader literature on ethno-nationalism and separatism.
For the most part, the literature on separatism and irredentism has adopted a cross-national analytical frame. We provide new micro-level data from a crucial but hitherto understudied case of separatism and irredentism, while utilizing a theory-driven approach to measuring national and ethnic identification. Our research design helps to overcome issues of selection by randomizing exposure to videos targeting psychological mechanisms that are theorized to be important drivers of social identification. These videos are widely available and depict actual violence. To our knowledge, similar interventions have not formed the basis of other large-scale survey experiments in developing country contexts, which typically use researcher-written vignettes that may appear artificial.
We find that there is a trade-off between the salience of ethno-regional and national identities. The Kashmiri identity is unassailable and diminishes identification with India. Repression of protests and the use of violence by the Indian state fuels the conflict by further diminishing national identification. Our key argument is that, conditional on having a strong ethno-regional identity which is itself the function of prior levels of conflict, violent crackdowns by the state will generate resentment, pushing regional minority group members to identify less with their nation. This creates a window for irredentist states, which can benefit by the anti-nationalist sentiment in the region.
We show that Kashmiris’ identification with Pakistan grows substantially with violence exposure, and that ethnic identification rises from its already high base. Individuals with attributes that are more likely to predict higher levels of national identification (having more education, or belonging to less separatist geographic regions, for instance) resemble their co-ethnics after treatment. In the absence of violent repression, however, a strong regional identity acts as a counterweight to irredentism (and identification with Pakistan is even weaker than with India). We find that regional identification is not easily supplanted by the national identity of the neighboring state.
This and several other findings from the Kashmir region point the way to the management of separatism and irredentism in border regions. Reducing incidents of violent repression is likely to weaken the identification of minorities with co-ethnics across the border, thereby reducing the plausibility of a strategy of irredentism, which would diminish the risk of interstate conflict. Yet, exposure to violence also causes study participants to express a lower willingness to engage in peaceful protests or endorse violence against the central government, illustrating the (potentially short-term) benefits of coercion from the state's perspective. We find that the psychological distance that is created by active conflict in Kashmir cannot be overcome by the perceived benefits of India's growing economic power or by efforts to integrate Kashmiri youth in state institutions. Cultivating national identification in the midst of active ethnic conflict might not be possible. Our research suggests that when perceived ethnic distance is too high, partly as a result of experiences of ethnic violence, material and institutional considerations will not be strong enough to induce national identification. This result can inform the strategies through which states can try to regain the loyalty of peripheral populations, and it also has implications for the literature on counter insurgency (COIN) and nation-building interventions. Winning hearts and minds via the provision of institutions and material benefits might not be possible in the context of active conflict that creates psychological distance between the state and minority populations.
Related Literature and Theory
In his classic study of ethnic conflict, Horowitz tells us that the relative prestige of two countries competing over control of minorities in border regions helps determine whether or not the minority will support irredentism.Footnote 10 He gives the example of the Sudeten Germans, who abandoned ethnically conciliatory parties and became staunch supporters of Hitler in the mid-1930s when Nazi Germany became a major power. Horowitz is one of the few political scientists to consider how inter-group status comparisons affect separatism. To date, there is no quantitative/empirical assessment of this claim, but Sambanis and Shayo focus attention on status comparisons in a formal model of ethnic conflict that is compatible with Horowitz's constructivist insights.Footnote 11 We draw on these studies to design our empirical investigation on the determinants of social identification.
With Horowitz, we assume that separatism reveals weak national identification. This might seem obvious, but it is a position not explored systematically in a literature that tends to dismiss affective explanations for ethnic conflict in favor of purely instrumental ones. Consistent with the Common In-group Identity Model (CIIM) in social psychology,Footnote 12 we assume that a tradeoff exists between nested subordinate and superordinate identities. The CIIM is consistent with classic views of nationalism and nation buildingFootnote 13 according to which national attachment diminishes the risk of domestic interethnic conflict. But how malleable is national (and ethnic) identification, particularly during active conflict?Footnote 14 Does exposure to ethnic violence harden identities to such an extent that integrationist and other state policies designed to increase national identification are doomed to fail?
Few studies have addressed this question. Grossman, Manekin, and Miodownik study the effects of violence exposure and find that combat experience in the Israeli army radicalizes attitudes, reducing the space for political compromise in the Arab-Palestinian conflict.Footnote 15 This is consistent with our expectations. But the broader literature is equivocal on whether or not violence exposure makes people less pro-social and increases out-group prejudice. Some argue that violence exposure during wartime increases pro-sociality by increasing altruismFootnote 16 and promoting civic engagement.Footnote 17 Yet others find the opposite—violence exposure decreases trustFootnote 18 and increases in-group bias.Footnote 19 None of these studies explore if explicitly integrationist policies or the perception of greater material or psychological benefits from rising national status reduces any negative effects of violence exposure. Our study is designed to address this question empirically in the context of the Kashmir conflict.
Our expectation is that ethnic violence makes ethnic identities more salient because it draws attention to the incompatibilities between the state and an ethnic minority and it heightens the significance of ethnic attributes that differentiate the minority from the rest of the nation.Footnote 20 There is no empirical evidence that we are aware of to contradict the claim that ethnic violence increases perceived distance from the nation. However, social identification is a complex process and the effects of violence on social distance might be offset by other considerations, such as material benefits that stem from being part of the nation or other instrumental motives.Footnote 21
If Horowitz's reasoning is correct, then as a country's international status rises relative to its competitors, the intensity of domestic ethnic conflict should decline as more people will identify nationally for both psychological and material reasons. As national status increases, more citizens will identify nationally because they will derive greater self-esteem from being part of a rising global power.Footnote 22 Similarly, the country's growing economic or military power should induce national identification because of the perception that more material benefits will accrue to its citizens by virtue of being part of the nation. The state can also solidify national identification by integrating minority groups in state institutions, such as the national army.Footnote 23
Integration with state institutions can provide minorities with ways to address their grievances and should diminish the feeling of political exclusion that can fuel conflict.Footnote 24 Military integration also provides recruits and their families with material rewards (jobs) while reducing their perceived distance from the nation: a Kashmiri serving in the Indian national army must feel closer to the rest of the nation as his sense of citizenship is reinforced by his profession. In addition, observing one's coethnics being represented in national institutions should reduce the psychological distance between one's ethnic and national identities. These arguments, which inform our empirical design, are supported by a wealth of experimental evidence in social psychology on the determinants of identification with a more inclusive super ordinate group. Shifting identification from subordinate to super ordinate groups has been shown to reduce in-group bias and out-group prejudice in the Common In-Group Identity Model (CIIM).Footnote 25
Membership in a social group could induce individuals to identify with that group.Footnote 26 To identify with a group means to care about the group's relative social standing (status) and about the payoffs of in-group members relative to an out-group. Controlling for “distance” between the individual and the rest of the group, social identification with a group is more likely the higher the group's status because belonging to high-status groups provides individuals with more utility. These key insights of social identity theory form the basis for our empirical inquiry.
To sum up the theoretical argument thus far, the main expectation is that any factor that increases a country's national status and diminishes perceived distance from the nation will induce citizens of that country to identify nationally at the expense of competing social (ethnic, religious, regional) identities.
We focus on how ethnic violence affects social identification and weigh its effects against other factors (status, interest) that should affect national identification. Theoretical models have established how exposure to ethnic violence increases perceived social distanceFootnote 27 and prolonged ethnic violence can reify ethnic identities, making it difficult for policy interventions to switch identification from ethnic to national. Prior literature has focused extensively on the question of ethnic distance as a determinant of irredentism and secession,Footnote 28 but the effects of distance could be offset by material inducements to identify with the nation.Footnote 29 There is now consensus that nationalist sentiment is not unwavering and that it can be affected by several variables, from the content of mass schooling systems,Footnote 30 to economic modernization,Footnote 31 colonial legacies,Footnote 32 public goods provision,Footnote 33 and external security threats.Footnote 34 These mechanisms are all examples of “material and institutional” determinants of social identification.Footnote 35 The main insight here is that identification is not static—it changes over time in response to social conditions. But how malleable is identity in the context of an active conflict? Can integrative institutions—such as minority recruitment in the military—and a growing economy offset ethnic distance between an ethnic minority and the nation?
No study to date has established empirically the relative weight of distance-related determinants of national versus ethnic identification versus material or status-related determinants. Our expectation is that, in an active conflict (an important scope condition for our study), the population will discount promises of material rewards and institutional integration will appear shallow, overshadowed by the weight of ongoing violence. If an ethnic minority does not see itself as part of the nation, then the nation's rising status relative to regional competitors will be seen as a threat rather than as a source of greater self-esteem. And integration of part of the minority in state institutions will be seen as co-opting and weakening the group rather than reducing its distance from the nation. Thus, our expectation is that, while status gains and institutional integration can be effective in some contexts, violence exposure will have a stronger effect on identification.
To summarize, we draw on social identity theory, the CIIM, and the applications of those theories to political scienceFootnote 36 to test the following five hypotheses:
H1
Strong ethno-regional identification will reduce national identification.
H2
Inter ethnic violence will reduce national identification.
H3
Violent repression by the state will increase identification with irredentist states.
H4
Higher national status will not increase national identification substantially given high levels of ethnic distance.
H5
Exposure to integrative institutions will not increase national identification substantially given high levels of ethnic distance.
Finally, in assessing the effects of violence exposure on nationalism, we establish connections between the literature on ethnic/national identification and the literature on repression. We do so by exploring heterogeneous effects of violence exposure and consider whether violent repression is effective in discouraging protest behavior.
Context
The setting for our study is the Kashmir Valley region of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, a region that is central to the enduring rivalry between India and Pakistan.Footnote 37 India is a large multi ethnic state with a civic nationalist tradition. In some Indian regions, ethnic and national identities are not conflicting. In the state of Kerala (at the other, southern, extreme of India), for instance, a strong subnational identity coexists with strong national identification.Footnote 38 Yet in other regions, as our evidence on Kashmir will show, ethnic conflict creates a trade-off between ethnic and national identities.
Kashmir presents an interesting case to test our hypotheses. Perceived social distance from the nation is high among Kashmiri Muslims because of high levels of prior conflict. Objective differences between Kashmiris and other Indians are made salient by Indian politics (incidents of Hindu-Muslim violence, electoral platforms that play on religious difference, the India-Pakistan conflict). Our qualitative fieldwork and interviews indicate that Kashmiris perceive themselves as a high-status group, and the theories of Horowitz and Sambanis and Shayo suggest that high-status groups are less likely to identify nationally.Footnote 39 This perception of inter group status is based on culture as well as physical attributes such as height, facial features, and skin color, which are emphasized in the region to draw sharp boundaries between Kashmir and the rest of India. As such, many individuals express a willingness to pay significant economic and personal costs to avoid further integration. The intensity of ethnic identification in Kashmir combined with active conflict makes this a least-likely case for predictions regarding the positive effects of national status on national identification. This sets a useful benchmark for future studies in other areas of India, where there is likely a greater abundance of factors supporting nationalism.
The Kashmir conflict has its origins in the partition of the Indian subcontinent along religious lines at the end of British rule in 1947. Each of the numerous princely states that made up the subcontinent could join either India or Pakistan, or remain independent. In practice, geography and popular pressure meant that none were ultimately able to exercise the latter option.
Both Pakistan and India claimed the territory of Kashmir. Kashmir had a majority Muslim population with a sizable Hindu minority but was governed by a Hindu ruler who vacillated between joining India or Pakistan. After Pakistan supported the invasion of tribesmen from the northwest to force the issue, the king signed an “instrument of accession” to merge Kashmir with India. India subsequently sent troops to the area, and the first war between the two countries broke out in 1947–48, which ended with a UN-sponsored ceasefire. Sheikh Abdullah, the most popular leader in the Kashmir Valley, opposed Kashmir's joining Pakistan at the time of the partition and called Pakistan an aggressor.Footnote 40
While Pakistan retained about 35 percent of the territory in the north and west, India secured most of the Sunni Muslim-dominated Kashmir valley, as well as the eastern and southern areas of Ladakh and Jammu, respectively. Ladakh is principally made up of Shia Muslims and Buddhists while Jammu has a majority Hindu and Sikh population (though one-third of the population is Muslim).Footnote 41 Three more wars have been waged between India and Pakistan over the disputed territory (in 1965, peripherally in 1971, and in 1999), but the 1948 ceasefire borders (demarcated by the “line of control’’) have remained basically unchanged, even though both countries claim the territory in its entirety.
The central government quickly grew distrustful of Kashmiri leaders, fearing that they harbored secessionist aims. As a consequence, it imprisoned Abdullah for long stretches of time. Jammu and Kashmir formally became a state in India in 1957, after the Jammu and Kashmir Constituent Assembly approved a merger with India in early 1956. Under the terms of its incorporation Jammu and Kashmir was given special status and autonomy under Article 370 of the Indian constitution. Elections during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were marred by widespread fraud that allowed the center, particularly under Indira Gandhi, to install puppet governments without widespread legitimacy. Two exceptions were the elections in 1977 and 1983, which by most accounts were not fraudulent.Footnote 42 By the late 1980s this crisis of legitimacy led to growing disenchantment with the Indian government, and a concomitant rise in separatist and irredentist views. A flawed election in 1987 served as the spark that caused these grievances to explode into a secessionist insurgency.
The insurgency enjoyed substantial material support from Pakistan and was accompanied by the growth of irredentist Islamic parties that favored union with Pakistan, in a trend that paralleled the contemporaneous rise of political Islam elsewhere in the world.Footnote 43 Nevertheless, while some militant groups preferred union with Pakistan, others resolutely sought independence, a division that was mirrored in the broader population.
As the insurgency grew during the 1990s, India's control over large swathes of the Valley declined precipitously. The central government dismissed the state government, imposed President's rule, and gave the armed forces a largely free hand to quell the insurgency. The insurgency and the state repression that followed produced enormous violence with tens of thousands of casualties (as well as an exodus of a previously significant Kashmiri Pandit Hindu minority). Although insurgent attacks and state repression remained quite common during the 1990s, the Indian government had contained the insurgency sufficiently to hold free and fair elections in 1996 and 1998 with relatively high turnout.
People living in Indian-administered Kashmir became unwilling or unable to bear the massive human and economic costs of the insurgency, and militants were increasingly drawn from Pakistan's side of the border over time. In an attempt at stifling India's successful counter insurgency, Pakistan supported an incursion into the strategically important peaks around the Kargil district in 1999. The ensuing war left hundreds of soldiers on both sides dead. The prospect of a nuclear confrontation led the United States to broker a ceasefire that led to a return to the status quo ante. Relatively free and fair elections have been held since then and cross-border incursions and the intensity of the insurgency declined until 2016, when violence again surged.
As our survey shows, large proportions of the population of the Kashmir Valley state a preference for Kashmir's independence. A much smaller minority seeks union with Pakistan. While irredentist sentiment was at its peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s,Footnote 44 it declined during the first decade of the twenty-first century because of Pakistan's struggles under military rule, slowing economic growth, pressure from the United States, and the rise of violent extremism within Pakistan's borders. Irredentist and secessionist views vary considerably even within the Valley and over time. This variation allows a unique opportunity to study the micro-dynamics of ethnic and national identification.
Study Design
Our design uses randomized interventions in the context of a face-to-face household survey to examine the effects of violence, status, and psychological distance on social identification. We use condensed YouTube videos that have been viewed thousands of times, or ask respondents to interact with maps that have direct real-world analogues. Such interventions have only recently become feasible at such a large scale in developing country settings with the advent of phone- and tablet-based survey methods. They allow researchers to present respondents with realistic content rather than relying on contrived vignettes or other constructed interventions that are the standard practice in survey experiments. The videos have both a priming component (they raise the salience of particular issues and identities) and an informational component, providing facts to respondents that they may not have been familiar with.Footnote 45
Randomization
We used four different treatments, sometimes in combination. Table 1 summarizes the experimental design. We describe the treatments here and include screen shots of each of the treatments in the appendix.
1. exposure to violence: Respondents assigned to this condition were shown a video of protesters and a violent crackdown. The video begins with a large group of protesters who are shouting the slogan “go back” in an urban setting before troops attempt to disperse the group using tear gas and ammunition. Fleeing protesters are chased by troops on foot and in armored cars. Some protesters continue to throw stones and the police and military respond by firing in the air and racing through the streets to break up the gathering. Our discussions with local researchers and nonacademics suggested that the film both realistically portrayed scenes that are common in the region and might be something that is shared by people using phones. After viewing the video, respondents were asked whether they had personally witnessed such events and were asked to share their opinions in an open-ended format. To our knowledge, this is the first study to experimentally manipulate exposure to violence to study its effects on polarization. Our goal is to understand whether state-led repression increases psychological distance from the nation; whether it increases identification with irredentist neighboring states; and whether it makes people more or less willing to participate in protests and endorse violence against the government.
Table 1.Study design and implementation
2. economic growth and national status: This treatment is a brief newsreel from a major India-wide news channel. The announcer describes the World Bank's Global Outlook Report, which predicts that India is poised to overtake China as the fastest growing major economy in the world. The announcer notes (in Hindi) that “your country will move ahead of China within two years” because of hopes raised by economic reforms that have been undertaken by the new government. She further states that there is talk of economic growth that is poised to reach all corners of the country and economy as India's economy grows at 7 percent or higher while China's slows down to grow at 6.9 percent or lower. Rapid economic growth in India is the source of considerable pride and many news outlets extensively cover India's changing status as an “emerging giant” and “world beater.” The explicit comparison with China is particularly important because it conveys messages of increasing international status.Footnote 46
3. integrative institutions: The political science literature on power sharing has focused on constitutional arrangements, electoral rules, and national-level institutions as solutions to the problem of political order in “divided” societies.Footnote 47 Yet, most people do not interact with politicians as much as they do with the military, police, and the bureaucracy. Accordingly, we examine whether national institutions that integrate disaffected ethnic minorities in the military can reduce ethnic identification.Footnote 48 In recent years, increasing numbers of Kashmiri youth have begun joining the national-level bureaucracy, police forces, and even the Indian Army (something that may have been unthinkable during the period of widespread insurgency). This trend is the subject of debate, pitting people who support such moves in an environment of high unemployment against those who view it as a betrayal of the struggle for independence. To test the importance of the psychological effects of having more integrated national institutions, we expose a random subset of respondents to a video about Kashmiri youths joining the Indian Army. The video shows the passing-out parade of 179 newly commissioned soldiers in the Indian Army's Jammu and Kashmir Light Infantry regiment. The video mentions that several inductees are from insurgency-hit areas, and then features a commanding officer who says that the army's recruitment drives meet great demand (a good sign in his view), before switching to an interview with a new inductee who says that it has been his ambition to join the army from an early age.
4. common geography: The final intervention presented subjects with a map of India with the location of four major Indian cities, including the capital, highlighted. Respondents were then asked to match a list of cities to the locations on the map. Maps play a central role in theories of nationalismFootnote 49 and the treatment allows us to prime national identity in a relatively unobtrusive way. Viewing the map with neighboring countries shaded should induce participants to think of themselves as Indian, as should the exercise of matching city names to the map. We use different versions of the map to generate three sub-treatments. In two versions, the map shows the state's boundaries as claimed by India, with one additionally showing a small Indian flag located in the top right-hand corner of the map to make the shared national identity more cognitively salient. A third version of the treatment additionally shows the Line of Control between India and Pakistan in addition to the boundaries as claimed by India. Figures A2 to A5 in the appendix include photographs from the video interventions and pictures of the maps used to raise the salience of a common national identity.Footnote 50
To examine the sensitivity of any increase in national identification induced through these mechanisms, we subsequently cross treatment groups 2, 3, and 4 with violence exposure or a control condition. After randomization, respondents were asked a series of questions designed to measure social identification along a number of dimensions.
Measuring Identity
Cross-national studies of nationalism have for the most part relied on off-the-shelf measures of self-reported attitudes culled from large repeated surveys. The World Values Survey (WVS) and AfroBarometer surveys are a main sourceFootnote 51 that include Likert-scale scores of national pride. These surveys claim to offer representative views of the population but conflict regions and mobilized minorities are often under represented.
The standard WVS measures of identity (e.g., “how proud are you of your nationality?”) produce almost uniformly high values for national identification with very little movement even in countries in the midst of ethnic or sectarian civil war. We provide a richer set of measures of identity than the previous literature, utilizing some questions that are similar to WVS, but with some modifications.
1. rank ordering of social identities: Subjects are asked to rank their Indian identity, Kashmiri identity, religious identity, and occupational identity in order of importance. We reverse-code this variable to take values from 1 to 4, with higher values indicating greater national identification.
2. self-identification: Respondents were asked whether they saw themselves as “Kashmiri only,” “Indian and Kashmiri,” or “Indian” only. This variable is coded to take a value of 1 if respondents identified themselves as “Indian” or “Indian and Kashmiri” and 0 otherwise.
3. kashmir's political status: We probed respondents’ political opinions as a measure of identification by asking them whether they thought (1) Kashmir should stay with India, maintaining the current status quo; (2) remain with India but be given more autonomy; (3) become independent after the two parts on either side of the border are merged; (4) or become a part of Pakistan. We code the variable to take a value of 1 if respondents selected option (1) or (2) and 0 otherwise.
4. india-pakistan preference: Respondents’ political attitudes were also measured by whether they thought Kashmir should remain part of India (1) or be merged with Pakistan (0) if independence were not an option. Using this variable, we intend to measure the extent to which exposure to violence makes Kashmiris more open to Pakistan's irredentism.Footnote 52
5. quasi-behavioral measure of identification: To better understand whether stated identification correlates with in-group bias as measured by behavior, enumerators told respondents that INR 30,000 (about USD 450, a sizeable sum in the local context) would be donated to nongovernmental organizations providing help to the poor, medical aid, or education assistance based on the responses of people participating in the survey. Respondents were asked what percentage of the bonus (in increments of 10%) they would like to donate to NGOs providing assistance to people living in Kashmir and NGOs providing assistance to people all over India. Subjects were told that they could donate the full amount to either NGO or some percentage to both and that one person's name would be randomly chosen by computer. After giving respondents a moment to make their decision, the enumerators then handed over the tablet to respondents to allow them to make their choice confidentially, using clearly numbered allocations with small coin images denoting the amount that would be donated to NGOs.Footnote 53 We measure national identification by the percentage of the bonus that is donated to the all-India NGO.
6. identification index i: We combine the separate measures into a single index of national identification using inverse covariance weighting.Footnote 54 Given the non response to the India-Pakistan preference question we exclude this variable from the index.Footnote 55
7. identification index ii: Again we compute an index of identification, but in this version include the India-Pakistan preference question.
8. participation in peaceful protests against the indian government: Interviewers read the following statement: “When the government threatens our rights, it sometimes becomes necessary to protest against these actions.” Then respondents were asked how likely they are to participate in peaceful protests against the Indian government in the future. Respondents were asked to rate this likelihood on a scale of 1 to 5, with this likelihood symbolized by circles of increasing size. Enumerators handed the device over to respondents, who made their choice, which activated a new screen.
9. endorsement of violence against the indian government: Immediately following the question about peaceful protests, respondents were asked, “and sometimes, the government's actions are so wrong that some believe that violent protest becomes necessary. Do you think violence against the Indian government is sometimes justified?” Again, subjects selected circles of increasing size, and we code this endorsement on a continuous scale from 1 to 5.
Prior to randomization, subjects were asked a short battery of demographic questions that sought information about age, gender, marital status, religion, household size, news consumption, occupation, income, and wealth.
Caveats
As with other survey and field experiments, researcher control over treatment assignment comes with trade-offs. Any real experience, including experiences of violence (being personally injured or losing a family member) will likely have deeper, more multifaceted effects on social identification than any experimental treatment that can be manipulated by researchers in the field or the lab. Differences in the form or intensity of violence could generate different reactions. Moreover, our results cannot speak to the persistence of any measured effects, or how they are likely to be affected when respondents are exposed to competing or complementary information. Because the interventions correspond to stimuli and information that respondents might have encountered in their own lives, we can only study the effect of an additional or marginal increment of these phenomena on respondents’ identification.
Despite these important caveats, our empirical strategy allows us to mitigate otherwise intractable problems of causal identification in conflict settings. The realism of our treatments compares favorably to those used in many similar studies. Governments’ efforts to control social media content through regulation and lengthy bans (“e-curfews”), suggest that they take the dissemination of such content seriously. As the video of Kashmiri youths joining the army suggests, they also view the production of such content as a potentially important means of shaping preferences. Since we want to explore the psychological mechanisms underlying social identification, the lack of a real economic or material benefit or cost is an advantage. A conservative interpretation of our study is that it sheds light on the short-term psychological determinants of identification. It accomplishes this goal by drawing on data from a large, representative sample of a region of significant policy and scholarly interest. To the extent possible, we rely later on secondary observational and qualitative literature to buttress our core findings and to demonstrate that they also correspond to long-term trends and have applicability beyond the survey setting.
Another set of caveats concerns research in conflict settings. Each element of the study design was approved by a university institutional review board. It was designed and implemented in partnership with academics at Kashmir University, and utilized questions and media that have been used previously in this setting or correspond to content that respondents would encounter in their daily lives.
The violence portrayed in the videos is not greater than what individuals would encounter by watching the news in the region or elsewhere in the world. While the video shows violent images, no individuals are shown being killed or maimed, and the video was edited to reflect a believable simulacrum of actual events without unduly risking trauma to individuals. Unlike a number of field experiments in developing countries, our study does not alter political institutions or economic relations in the community, and we do not create winners and losers. From a policy perspective we show that while coercion may reduce the incidence of protests against the state, it also might create the longer-term conditions that encourage protest by strengthening separatist and irredentist sentiment.
Enumerators were encouraged to conduct interviews with only the respondent present (if possible) and respondents could decline to answer any question. While the low level of education precluded respondents from taking the survey themselves, they recorded responses to particularly sensitive questions (such as the endorsement of protests) using intuitive symbols on the phones used to record their responses (which automatically skipped to the next screen). Their responses were confidential and all identifying information was kept separate from survey responses. The data were transmitted to a secure server on a daily basis, after which it was not retained on the devices. A considerable amount of effort was put into recruiting qualified enumerators, training them extensively, and supervising and auditing their work. While the enumerators are from the same region as the respondents, potentially biasing our findings through interviewer effects, these biases (and non response rates) would likely have been larger if the interviewers were from outside Kashmir.
Implementation and Sample Characteristics
Our sampling strategy was designed to maximize the representativeness of our subject pool with respect to the population of adults over the age of eighteen in the Kashmir Valley; we did not expand the scope of the study to Jammu or Ladakh for logistical reasons. Accordingly, we sampled half the state legislative assembly constituencies in proportion to population size in all ten districts of the Valley. Subsequently, we selected polling booths at random and used electoral rolls to identify a sampling frame. Because most government services require voter registration, almost all individuals are registered on electoral rolls (even if many polling booths report near-zero turnout for national and state-level elections). After generating a random number and interval between voter numbers, enumerators attempted to contact respondents. If they failed to locate a respondent, they simply selected the next person defined by the interval and attempted to contact that individual. This produced a known, verifiable sampling frame.
After a week-long training, a survey team consisting of twenty-three enumerators (eighteen female) and four managers (two female), all with at least a BA degree and most with a master's degree, completed the surveying in November–December 2015.Footnote 56 Interviews typically lasted between thirty and forty minutes.
Our sample consists of 2,522 people (49% female, 51% male). Basic demographic information collected includes education level, age, income, type of occupation, and a number of other variables. While education levels are low in this population (36.4% of the subjects have no formal education), this is not atypical compared to the rest of India. Median monthly household income is between 5,000 and 10,000 Indian Rupees (USD 75 to USD 150) (though, as with other household surveys in India, non-cash income and systematic underreporting of incomes mean that this may be an underestimate).
A large share (35%) of the sample is composed of unemployed women, most of them in their late twenties to early forties. Laborers, students, agriculture workers, and small business owners are the most heavily represented groups. About 7 percent work in state government. Very few (0.4%) work for the central government and an equally small percentage are professionals (doctors, engineers, lawyers). The population is primarily Sunni Muslim (93% of our sample) with just over 5 percent of our sample being Shia Muslim. Hindus are no longer well-represented in the region (they make up just 0.2% of the sample).
Interview subjects were remarkably open about their views. Refusal rates were very low despite the sensitive nature of many of the questions. When asked their opinions about the status of Kashmir, only 5.7 percent of subjects refused to answer and 65 percent reported pro-independence attitudes. The one question with relatively high refusal rates (31%) concerns preferences over India versus Pakistan (i.e., strong proponents of Kashmiri independence are reluctant to support either India or Pakistan). People are distrustful of the state (63% report that they never trust the government referring to the state government; 89% report distrusting the central government of India); and they are even more distrustful of the media (89%). Over 90 percent report distrust toward the Indian army and negative attitudes extend to the local police (82%). These negative views seem to be supported by a widely shared perception of increasing human rights violations (64% of the sample think these have increased over the previous two years, compared to 22% who think they have decreased). Moreover, these violations are taking place in a climate of decreasing insurgent violence. Survey subjects for the most part (55%) share the view that militancy has decreased. This suggests a shared perception of unwarranted repression by the state. About (38%) of respondents claim to have personally witnessed violence by the police or army and even fewer (7%) report having been injured by violence.
The vast majority of respondents rank their regional or religious identities as most important to them and their national identity comes last. The privileging of parochial identities at the expense of the national one is reflected in clear evidence of in-group bias in our quasi-behavioral measure of identification: on average, 75 percent of respondents’ donations go to the Kashmir-only NGO and only 25 percent to the all-India NGO.
It is against this backdrop of intense ethno-regionalism that we apply the experimental interventions described earlier.
Violence Exposure and Ethnic Identification
Our analysis begins by focusing on the effects of exposure to violence on ethnic and national identification, first in an observational setting using self-reported violence exposure and then using the experimental data.
We code a dichotomous variable that takes a value of 1 (and 0 otherwise) if a respondent answered in the affirmative to any of the following statements: personally witnessed violence against others by the police or military; been personally injured in the conflict; had home or business been damaged in the conflict; been taken into custody or detained by police/army; someone in the immediate or extended family has been injured in the conflict or died or disappeared in mysterious circumstances. According to this measure, 57 percent of the sample has been exposed to violence. For each of the outcome measures, we then estimate three separate OLS linear probability models of the form:
$$f\,(Y_i) = \beta _0 + \beta _1ReportedViolenceExposure_i + \gamma \Theta _i + {\rm \epsilon} $$
$$f\,(Y_i) = \beta _0 + \beta _1ReportedViolenceExposure_i + \gamma \Theta _i + \pi X_i + {\rm \epsilon} $$
$$f\,(Y_i) = \beta _0 + \beta _1ReportedViolenceExposure_i + \gamma \Theta _i + \pi X_i + \mu _i + {\rm \epsilon} $$Where i indexes individual respondents and β 1 is the principal quantity of interest we estimate by regressing an outcome of interest Y on a dummy variable indicating reported violence exposure. The outcome variables have been coded to indicate greater national identification or a greater willingness to participate in or higher endorsement of protests when they take higher values. We utilize data from the full sample with Θi representing a vector of controls for random assignment to the five principal experimental conditions (with the control group being the reference category). X i is a vector of individual-level covariates including age, gender, education, religion, household head, wealth, and government occupation. μ i are constituency fixed effects and ε is the error term. We calculate heteroskedasticity-robust (Huber-White) standard errors for all regressions. Figure 1 summarizes the results graphically using a coefficient plot of the estimated “effect” of violence exposure on national identification. The appendix has the corresponding regression tables.
Coefficient plot for correlation between self-reported exposure to violence (1/0) and national identification
The main pattern that emerges from Figure 1 is that self-reported violence exposure is negatively correlated with national identification across the range of different survey responses and when these measures are combined into an index of national identification. In addition, those respondents who report being exposed to violence in the past are also more likely to endorse peaceful and violent protests against the Indian government.
There are obvious reasons to be skeptical of these correlations. Exposure to violence is itself a function of weak national identification. Individuals who identify most strongly with their ethnic group may be more likely to support separatism or irredentism and may also be most willing to pay personal costs in the form of state coercion to further these political goals. Simply controlling for individual or geographic characteristics that predict both violence exposure and identification is unlikely to produce credible estimates using cross-sectional data (and risks post-treatment bias). Unobservable variables may account for any measured correlation between violence exposure and identification. Individuals who identify ethnically may be more liable to report exposure to violence to justify their political preference or for other instrumental reasons. Exposure to violence at the level of a geographic aggregate need not affect all individuals and will also produce sorting according to preferences and identification. Panel data might help to mitigate some problems of reverse causality and selection, but even then unobservable time-varying confounding variables may lead to bad inferences.
Our experimental design helps to resolve some of these problems by randomizing exposure to a real-world analogue of state coercion. It also allows estimation using simple difference-in-means tests or corresponding linear probability models with minimal functional form assumptions. For each of the outcome measures detailed below we estimate OLS and linear probability models of the form:
$$f\,(Y_i) = \beta _0 + \beta _1ViolenceExposure_i + {\rm \epsilon} $$where i indexes individual respondents. An outcome of interest Y is regressed on a dummy variable indicating if a respondent is assigned to a video of protests and state-led crackdowns (with the control group serving as the reference category). Table 3 summarizes the results.
Sample characteristics
Average treatment effects: exposure to violence
Notes: **p < .05; ***p < .01 (two-tailed); robust standard errors in parentheses.
(1) Rank Ordering of Social Identities: Rank of Indian identity (1 to 4) with higher values indicating greater national identification.
(2) Self-Identification: Respondent sees herself as “Indian Only” or “Indian and Kashmiri” (1) or “Kashmiri Only” (0).
(3) Kashmir's Political Status: Kashmir should remain with India (1) rather than becoming independent or joining Pakistan (0).
(4) India-Pakistan Preference: If independence is not an option, should Kashmir remain with India (1) or join Pakistan (0).
(5) Behavioral Measure of Identification: Allocation to all-India NGO (%) rather than NGO working only in Kashmir.
(6) Index of National Identification I: Excluding India-Pakistan preference.
(7) Index of National Identification II: Including India-Pakistan preference.
(8) Participation in Peaceful Protests: Stated willingness to participate in peaceful protests against the Indian government (1 to 5).
(9) Support for Violence: Endorsement of violence against the Indian government (1 to 5).
When respondents were asked to voice their opinions (in an open-ended format) about the video, large numbers noted that the security forces were using excessive force and that the army and police presence should be reduced. A significant fraction also reported that the events portrayed in the video were common occurrences. Indeed, 47.4 percent of respondents said they had seen such events. Of the remainder, 46.8 percent of respondents reported that they had not seen such events, while 5.8 percent refused to answer the question.
Table 3 shows that exposure to violence generally caused consistently lower levels of national identification among respondents. When respondents are asked to rank their religious, ethnic, national and occupational identities in order of how important they are to them, the national identity is ranked last (1 in our coding scheme) by 78 percent of control group respondents. A further 16 percent of respondents say that this identity is second-to-last in importance. The mean national identification falls from 1.30 in the control condition to 1.24 in the violence condition. Similarly, the proportion of individuals who see themselves as either Indian or Indian and Kashmiri declines from 23 percentFootnote 57 to 19 percent, the average percentage of a donation that respondents prefer to send to an Indian NGO (over the Kashmiri) falls from 25.6 percent to 22.8 percent and the proportion of respondents who support a policy whereby Kashmir remains a part of India (rather than becoming independent or joining with Pakistan) declines from 29 percent to 25 percent.
These results are not significant at conventional thresholds, but point in the same direction and column 6 shows a statistically significant decrease in the index of national identification that combines these various measures. It is remarkable that state-led repression further reduces identification with the nation even when this identity is already extraordinarily weak.
Moreover, these effects are still stronger where identities are in greater flux and not as liable to floor effects—in particular in response to questions about whether respondents identify more strongly with India or Pakistan. If independence is not an option, the percentage of subjects preferring India over Pakistan declines by nine percentage points from 61 percent to 52 percent. Thus, violent repression by the state causes greater identification with an irredentist neighbor. Along with the treatment effects on the combined indexes (columns 6 and 7), these results suggest that national identification declines with exposure to state violence.Footnote 58
If state-led repression serves to strengthen parochial and non-national identities, then why do governments turn to violence in the first place? Column 8 suggests an answer. While national identification declines when study subjects are exposed to the violence treatment, they are also significantly less likely on average to say they would participate in peaceful protests. In short, the government may not lose the loyalty of an already hostile population; but by using repression it might deter moderates from collective action, even as the seeds of future grievances are sown.Footnote 59
What mechanisms might account for this finding? Respondents may update their beliefs about the likelihood of being the victim of state violence themselves. Indeed, a rational fear of consequences might explain respondents' declining willingness to participate in protests.Footnote 60 Yet, if such purely instrumental motives alone are at work, it is not clear why study subjects don't express higher levels of identification with the nation when this could reduce the probability of becoming the target of state coercion. An alternative mechanism draws on the psychological theories of national and ethnic identification that we set forth previously. These theories postulate that individuals do not solely choose identities with reference to material considerations but also derive self-esteem from membership in particular groups. Exposure to state-led violence could increase the psychological distance between ethnic and national identities and thereby increase ethnic identification and support for irredentism, which over the longer term may increase the incidence of separatist violence, even if state coercion reduces protests in the short term.Footnote 61
Heterogeneous Effects of Violence Exposure
The overall impact of violence exposure is to reduce national identification and increase irredentism and ethnic identification, but an important question is whether these effects are concentrated among particular subgroups of the population. Column 3 of Table 4 examines heterogeneous effects by measuring the effect of the violence exposure intervention in interaction with respondent characteristics measured prior to randomization. The dependent variable is the index of national identification. The estimated quantities are descriptive rather than causal (the variables that define the subgroups are not randomly assigned) and, as with other analyses of effect heterogeneity, there is a risk that the findings are attributable to sampling variability.
Heterogeneous treatment effects of violence exposure on national identification index
Notes: **p < .05, ***p < .01 (two-tailed); robust standard errors in parentheses.
Keeping these important caveats in mind, the data suggest that violence exposure reduces national identification by more among those with greater education and among respondents from constituencies with above-median (control group) national identification.
Exposing respondents to state-led repression makes national identifiers statistically indistinguishable from their co-ethnics. While the proportion of less-educated respondents who see themselves as Indian or Indian and Kashmiri remains unchanged (19%) when these study subjects are exposed to violence, the equivalent proportion declines from 32 percent to 17 percent among those with at least a secondary school education. High-education respondents ranked their Indian identity lower after being exposed to violence and reduced the amount they donated to the NGO working all over India by one-third, reducing their allocation from 31.4 percent to 19.9 percent. Among the more educated subgroup, the proportion who believe that Kashmir should remain a part of India (rather than becoming independent or joining Pakistan) declines from 27 percent to 21 percent. When faced with a binary choice of Kashmir joining Pakistan or remaining part of India, support for remaining with India falls by more than a quarter—from 59 percent to 43 percent, compared to a smaller fall (seven percentage points) among the less educated. Similarly, we find somewhat larger treatment effects among people from above-median national-identifying constituencies. Treatment heterogeneity may be because of a “floor effect” since baseline national identification among the less educated is already very low (though we observe similarly heterogeneous effects for the endorsement of protests in Figure A8 and Table A13 in the appendix and there is more variation in responses to the protest endorsement questions). This result also likely reflects the fact that state coercion has the potential to polarize moderates even if they themselves are not the direct targets of this violence.Footnote 62
In summary, we find that exposure to state-led repression causes national identification and willingness to participate in or endorse actions against the central state to decline, particularly among those who generally identify more strongly with the nation.
Status, Integrative Institutions, and Common Geography
Next, we turn to the effects of national status and integrative institutions on identification. We asked study participants to view a video describing India's economic growth and rising status in the world, watch a video of Kashmiri youths joining the Indian army, and point out Indian cities on a map.Footnote 63 Half the respondents assigned to each of these treatment conditions were subsequently assigned to watch the video of state crackdowns on protesters. We estimate OLS regressions with the following form:
$$\eqalign{& f\,(Y_i) = \beta _0 + \beta _1EconomicGrowth_i + \beta _2IntegrativeInstitutions_i + \cr & \quad \beta _3CommonGeography_i + \nu _i + {\rm \epsilon}} $$Once again, the unit of analysis is the individual i and we examine differences in means and proportions across treatment and control conditions using the same set of outcome variables specified previously. ν i is a fixed effect for the additional (orthogonal) randomization of violence exposure.Footnote 64 Table 5 summarizes a straightforward empirical result: national identification does not significantly increase (and endorsement of actions against the Indian government does not substantially decrease) in response to any of the treatments.
Average treatment effects: economic growth, integrative institutions, and common geography
Notes: **p < .05; ***p < .01 (two-tailed); robust standard errors in parentheses.
(1) Rank Ordering of Social Identities: Rank of Indian identity (1 to 4) with higher values indicating greater national identification.
(2) Self-Identification: Respondent sees herself as “Indian Only” or “Indian and Kashmiri” (1) or “Kashmiri Only” (0).
(3) Kashmir's Political Status: Kashmir should remain with India (1) rather than becoming independent or joining Pakistan (0).
(4) India-Pakistan Preference: If independence is not an option, should Kashmir remain with India (1) or join Pakistan (0).
(5) Behavioral Measure of Identification: Allocation to all-India NGO (%) rather than NGO working only in Kashmir.
(6) Index of National Identification I: Excluding India-Pakistan preference.
(7) Index of National Identification II: Including India-Pakistan preference.
(8) Participation in Peaceful Protests: Stated willingness to participate in peaceful protests against the Indian government (1 to 5).
(9) Support for Violence: Endorsement of violence against the Indian government (1 to 5).
The setting, while important from a scholarly and policy perspective, is also one where ethnic identities are deeply entrenched and, conversely, where national identification is weak. This is shown by the fact that over two-thirds of the sample supports independence for the region and three-quarters consider themselves Kashmiri only (rather than Indian or Indian and Kashmiri). Thus, ethnic distance is so large that it may take a huge change in national status or in material incentives to induce individuals to identify nationally. Kashmir could be considered a least likely case for the theory that integrative institutions or high national status would induce national identification.
Respondents’ views on the news segment on India's accelerating growth are telling. Only about one-third of respondents felt that India's economic growth would benefit them; the remainder either noted that the growth would not benefit them personally or else provided an irrelevant answer. This sense among respondents that they would not personally benefit from growth was also reflected in respondents' belief that other Kashmiris would not be made better off.Footnote 65 Nor did a majority think that India's rapid economic growth would change how it is seen around the world.Footnote 66 We interpret this as consistent with a pre-existing large psychological distance from the nation because of a history of conflict and mutual suspicion. Kashmiris who do not see themselves as part of the nation will not expect to benefit from India's economic power and are less likely to accept (or state) that India's international status is rising.
The news segment on economic growth is readily comprehensible to Urdu speakers (Urdu is understood by almost all individuals living in Kashmir) but some of the spoken words and all the written words (which are restated by the anchor) are in Hindi, which differs from Urdu in script and some vocabulary. The language of the video and its overtly nationalistic tone may have caused some respondents to identify ethnically. Nevertheless, while the treatment may have had these effects, it also corresponds to how individuals might actually be exposed to this content in their lives (rather than in a form that is contrived by the researchers as is the case in many vignette-based experiments).Footnote 67 The video's much greater correspondence with reality than is true of many survey experiments has the cost that we cannot identify the precise mechanisms at work, but it does suggest that any increase in national identification that could be generated by information that India is rising in economic status is not sufficient to displace the weight of other factors and considerations that increase “ethnic” distance from the nation.
Qualitative data and recent studies in other contexts provide some confidence that these effects are not solely a function of the treatments, but also comport with broader trends and literature. The outbreak of Kashmir's insurgency in 1989, and its intensification during the 1990s and early 2000s, corresponds to a period of rapid economic growth and rising international status for India (See Table 6 and Figure 2). The null result in the experimental context thus reflects a general phenomenon.
Plot of GDP growth India and insurgency-related casualties in Kashmir over time
Unemployment is high and the state's economic development has been damaged by conflict, but according to the National Sample Survey (2011–12) Jammu and Kashmir has the ninth lowest rate of poverty among India's twenty-nine states (10.4% compared to a national average of 21.9%). And while economic growth in recent years has trailed the national mean, state GDP growth was still high.Footnote 68 While Kashmir accounts for about 1 percent of India's population, it received as much as 10 percent of central government transfers in the 2000–2016 period.Footnote 69 Numerous discussions with individuals in the region suggest that many people see the demand for political independence as a product of cultural and psychological distance rather than economic grievance. Indeed, many are aware that deep poverty is far more endemic in other regions compared to Kashmir.
The results from the other interventions also suggest low levels of national integration in our sample. When respondents were shown the video of youths joining the army, 53 percent of them said they felt that the youths had made the wrong decision, though the remainder stated that they thought that they were right to enlist (some participants pointed to high youth unemployment as a justification for this view). The inability of the military's integrative effort to elicit greater national identification in the survey context echoes the fact that irredentist and separatist sentiment has endured (even as the scope of militancy has waned) despite intense government efforts to win hearts and minds through infrastructure investment, army “Goodwill Schools,” healthcare facilities, vocational training, youth exchange programs, and a variety of other interventions.
The effectiveness of the Indian army's strategy to win “hearts and minds” through its “Operation Sadbhavana” has not yet been subjected to quantitative scrutiny. But based on qualitative data and interviews Nabi and Ye and Chakrabarti come to the conclusion that the effort has been unsuccessful because citizens’ political preferences and identities do not change (even if they derive material benefits from these efforts) in an environment in which violence and coercion remain widespread.Footnote 70 Indeed, Nabi and Ye note that during large-scale protests in 2010, “many Sadbhavana projects became targets … as they were seen as symbols of the Indian military occupation. Hoardings which carried the message ‘Jawan and awam Aman hay Mukam’ (soldiers and people, together can bring peace) were the first targets.”Footnote 71
A growing literature that examines the impact of development programs on conflict suggests that development spending can increase conflict,Footnote 72 or has mixed effects and does not affect security.Footnote 73 The effectiveness of such interventions is likely to be highly dependent on local context. Dasgupta, Gawande, and Kapur find that the roll-out of India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme generated a large decrease in Maoist conflict violence.Footnote 74 To the extent that the Maoist insurgency in India is motivated principally by economic grievances, the apparent failure of development programs and integrative efforts in the Kashmir Valley suggests that high levels of ethnic identification are likely to be an important feature of the local context that determines the success or failure of “hearts and minds” programs.Footnote 75
The “null” results from our common geography intervention indicate that symbols of a common national identity (the flag; a map of India) are insufficient to bridge the gap dividing the Kashmiris from the rest of India. Three-quarters of the respondents were unable (or did not want) to identify a single city on the map of India that was shown to the respondents assigned to the “Common Geography” group. Low levels of education could account for these results.Footnote 76 The map treatment was not delivered in the form of a video, unlike the other three treatments related to violence, economic growth, and integrative institutions, so comparing the effect magnitudes of the map treatment to the others is difficult given its subtlety and minimal informational component. Overall, our results suggest that altering the low salience of a common national identity through psychological mechanisms in an environment of violent conflict that reinforces ethnic identification is likely to be a difficult task.
Conclusion
We have examined how mechanisms of violence, status, and distance shape social identification in the context of an active conflict. In studying these mechanisms, we have used new data from the Kashmir Valley, a central case of separatist and irredentist conflict. Our research design was novel in its use of condensed videos to study social identification and after randomly assigning respondents to watch videos that are easily and widely available, we quantified identification using an array of measures. A number of results emerge from this analysis. We find that ethnic and national identities in Kashmir are competing and not complementary and that strong ethno-regional identification results in severe in-group bias. At the same time, a strong ethnic identity also acts as a counterweight to irredentism, and identification with Pakistan is even lower than it is with India. We also find that state-sponsored repression reduces national identification, particularly where identities are in greater flux—in this case identification with India or Pakistan can change significantly as a result of violence exposure. These effects seem to be more concentrated among those who otherwise identify more strongly with the nation. Identification in this context—a hard case where psychological distance to the national identity is large—is not sensitive to increases in national status or interventions designed to reduce psychological distance by integrating Kashmiris into national institutions.
The most robust result in cross-country studies of civil war is the negative correlation between per capita income or income growthFootnote 77 and civil war risk. This correlation has led many analysts to argue that the answer to civil war is economic development. There are likely several complex mechanisms underlying the correlation between development levels and civil war and the existing literature has not yet identified those mechanisms. To the extent that social identification is one of the factors fueling violent separatism, our study suggests that development strategies based on increasing rates of economic growth will not be sufficient to end the conflict. Similarly, our study speaks to the design and timing of peace-building strategies based on investments in integrative institutions. Such investments are unlikely to be successful unless threats to security are first addressed. Ongoing violence generates enmity and suspicion that diminish the potential of integrative policies.
The practical implications of our findings are sobering. They suggest that national identification in the Kashmir Valley is both extremely low and unlikely to increase in the short run, even in an era of high growth and rising international prestige for India. Integrative institution building and economic development could be winning strategies in many contexts, but our study suggests that they cannot buy the target population's loyalty when social distance is very large. A hypothesis emerging from our study is that nation-building strategies in divided places will succeed only once the population's desire for security is satisfied and violence ends. Moreover, the availability of an “exit” option can complicate nation building in peripheral regions such as Kashmir, where there are interferences by cross-border kin groups and neighboring states with irredentist designs. Low levels of national identification are likely to result in continued demands for political independence that will spill over into street-level protests (and perhaps continued militancy) and are in turn likely to be checked through state-led coercion, thus ensuring that places like Kashmir remain caught in a trap of high ethnic identification and conflict.
Supplementary Material
Supplementary material for this article is available at <https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818318000498>.
