Julian Wucherpfennig
Biographic Data
| ID | 1160113 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Julian Wucherpfennig |
| GIVEN NAMES | Julian |
| FAMILY NAME | Wucherpfennig |
| SIGNATURE | WUCHERPFENNIG J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hertie School |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8935-1373 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 579 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
The Return of Nationalist Geopolitics: Liberal Backsliding and Armed Conflict
The post-Cold War decline in violent conflict has given way to rising instability both within and between states. While many attribute this shift to intensified great power competition, we argue that nationalist geopolitics, manifested through conflict driven by grievances reflecting the political exclusion of ethnic groups and their kin, offer a more accurate explanation. We explain how endogenous and exogenous factors weakened the liberal inter…
Weapons of Mass Deterrence: How Nuclear Threats Succeed
Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022 has put nuclear security back in the spotlight, especially through Russian nuclear threats intended to undermine and deter European arms delivery to Ukraine, ranging from battle tanks to cruise missiles to fighter jets. While a growing body of literature has examined the conditions under which nuclear weapons use is publicly endorsed, surprisingly little is known about the recipient effects of nuclear threats. W…
Do Foreign Military Deployments Provide Assurance? Unpacking the Micro-Mechanisms of Burden Sharing in Alliances
How do US foreign military deployments impact the defense policies of host states? Dominant scholarship holds that these deployments play a pivotal role in assuring allies that their security is guaranteed, which in turn leads host countries to neglect their national defense contributions. In this research note, we examine the micro-foundations of this conventional wisdom, investigating how nuclear and conventional troop deployments impact attitu…
Sharing Power, Securing Peace: Ethnic Inclusion and Civil War
Does power sharing bring peace? Policymakers around the world seem to think so. Yet, while there are many successful examples of power sharing in multi-ethnic states, such as Switzerland, South Africa and Indonesia, other instances show that such arrangements offer no guarantee against violent conflict, including Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Zimbabwe and South Sudan. Given this mixed record, it is not surprising that scholars disagree as to whether power …
Precolonial and Colonial Origins of Inclusive Peace
In a recent contribution to this journal, Richard McAlexander seeks to reanalyze Wucherpfennig, Hunziker, and Cederman’s “Who Inherits the State?” which instruments the effect of ethnic group inclusion on civil conflict by exploiting differences in colonial governance between the French and British empires. McAlexander proposes a research design that replaces the between-colony dimension of Wucherpfennig et al.’s comparison with a continuous meas…
Trojan Horse, Copycat, or Scapegoat? Unpacking the Refugees-Terrorism Nexus
Widespread fear that hosting refugees will mean more terrorism in host states is at the heart of the "refugee crisis." Yet, we lack rigorous evidence for such claims. This article theoretically unpacks how and under what conditions transnational refugee movements plausibly lead to different types of terrorist outcomes. Combining original data with a multipronged approach involving a treatment-placebo design as well as instrumental variable estima…
A Fast Estimator for Binary Choice Models with Spatial, Temporal, and Spatio-Temporal Interdependence
Binary outcome models are frequently used in the social sciences and economics. However, such models are difficult to estimate with interdependent data structures, including spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal autocorrelation because jointly determined error terms in the reduced-form specification are generally analytically intractable. To deal with this problem, simulation-based approaches have been proposed. However, these approaches (i) are…
Executive Power Sharing in the Face of Civil War
Scholars have debated whether executive power sharing can secure peace in multiethnic states, but concerns about endogeneity due to reverse causation render this a difficult problem for empirical analyses. In the absence of a suitable instrumental variable, I explore an actor-based approach by studying a simple formal model. This highlights the conditions under which governments are likely to share power with a domestic challenger depending on th…
Strategic rebels: A spatial econometric approach to rebel fighting durations in civil wars
Recent research on multi-actor civil wars highlights that rebel organizations condition their conflict behavior on that of other rebel organizations, with competition and free-riding constituting the core theoretical mechanisms. We provide a new actor-centric approach to explicitly model strategic interdependence in multi-actor civil wars. We argue that rebel organizations have incentives to remain mobilized until the end of a conflict to maintai…
Power Sharing: Institutions, Behavior, and Peace
Grievances that derive from the unequal treatment of ethnic groups are a key motivation for civil war. Ethnic power sharing should therefore reduce the risk of internal conflict. Yet conflict researchers disagree on whether formal power‐sharing institutions effectively prevent large‐scale violence. We can improve our understanding of the effect of power‐sharing institutions by analyzing the mechanisms under which they operate. To this effect, we …
International Conventions and Nonstate Actors: Selection, Signaling, and Reputation Effects
Whether international humanitarian norms are respected during and after civil conflict depends on the behavior of both governments and nonstate actors (NSAs). However, international conventions on the protection of civilians generally do not address NSAs, as such conventions are open only to the representatives of states. In a pioneering initiative, the nongovernmental organization Geneva Call has started to address this problem by soliciting NSA…
The Diffusion of Inclusion: An Open-Polity Model of Ethnic Power Sharing
While there is a growing consensus that ethnic inclusion produces peace, less is known about what causes transitions to power sharing between ethnic groups in central governments in multiethnic states. The few studies that have addressed this question have proposed explanations stressing exclusively domestic factors. Yet, power sharing is spatially clustered, which suggests that diffusion may be at play. Inspired by studies of democratic diffusio…
Predicting the decline of ethnic civil war: Was Gurr right and for the right reasons
Many scholars have detected a decrease of political violence, but the causes of this decline remain unclear. As a contribution to this debate, we revisit the controversy over trends in conflict after the end of the Cold War. While many made ominous predictions of surging ethnic warfare, Gurr presented evidence of a pacifying trend since the mid-1990s and predicted a further decline in ethnic conflict in an article on 'the waning of ethnic war'. L…
Inequalities Between Ethnic Groups, Conflict, and Political Organizations
We highlight that ethnic conflicts are typically about ‘nationality problems’ of self-rule, and thus best understood as ethno-nationalist conflicts that are driven by political and economic inequalities between groups. Recent, large-scale data collection and analysis find systematic evidence for such a link, but what is needed is a firmer understanding of the precise causal mechanisms, including ethnic mobilization processes through political org…
Who Inherits the State? Colonial Rule and Postcolonial Conflict
Postulating grievance‐based mechanisms, several recent studies show that politically excluded ethnic groups are more likely to experience civil conflict. However, critics argue that endogeneity may undermine this finding since governments' decisions to include or exclude could be motivated by the anticipation of conflict. We counter this threat to inference by articulating a causal pathway that explains ethnic groups' access to power independentl…
Territorial Autonomy in the Shadow of Conflict: Too Little, Too Late
This article evaluates the effect of territorial autonomy on the outbreak of internal conflict by analyzing ethnic groups around the world since WWII. Shedding new light on an ongoing debate, we argue that the critics have overstated the case against autonomy policies. Our evidence indicates that decentralization has a significant conflict-preventing effect where there is no prior conflict history. In postconflict settings, however, granting auto…
Transborder Ethnic Kin and Civil War
A series of studies has shown that civil wars are caused not only by factors inside countries, but also by effects operating across state borders. Whereas a first wave of quantitative studies demonstrated that such effects make the “closed-polity” assumption untenable, more recently researchers have identified particular causal mechanisms driving conflict. Despite these recent advances, a central puzzle remains unresolved, namely why ethnic group…
Ethnicity, the State, and the Duration of Civil War
Previous research has focused primarily on how ethnicity may trigger civil war, and its effect on conflict duration remains disputed. Rather than treating conflict as a direct consequence of ethnic cleavages, the authors argue that ethnicity per se does not affect civil war duration. Instead, its effect depends on its relationship to political institutions. They employ a dyadic approach that emphasizes the political context in which both governme…
Polygyny or Misogyny? Reexamining the “First Law of Intergroup Conflict”
Kanazawa (2009) proposes a “first law of intergroup conflict”, suggesting that polygyny and its impact on access to reproductive women provides “the ultimate cause ” for civil war. This controversial claim is supported by an empirical analysis at odds with most existing studies of civil wars. We reconsider the influence of polygyny in a more conven-tional statistical model. We fail to find evidence that ethnic groups with polygyny engage more fre…
Politically Relevant Ethnic Groups across Space and Time: Introducing the GeoEPR Dataset
This article introduces GeoEPR, a geocoded version of the Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) dataset that charts politically relevant ethnic groups across space and time. We describe the dataset in detail, discuss its advantages and limitations, and use it in a replication of Cederman, Wimmer and Min’s (2010) study on the causes of ethno-nationalist conflict. We show that territorial conflicts are more likely to involve groups that settle far away from…
Ethnicity, the State, and the Duration of Civil War
Previous research has focused primarily on how ethnicity may trigger civil war, and its effect on conflict duration remains disputed. Rather than treating conflict as a direct consequence of ethnic cleavages, the authors argue that ethnicity per se does not affect civil war duration. Instead, its effect depends on its relationship to political institutions. They employ a dyadic approach that emphasizes the political context in which both governme…
Politically Relevant Ethnic Groups across Space and Time: Introducing the GeoEPR Dataset
This article introduces GeoEPR, a geocoded version of the Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) dataset that charts politically relevant ethnic groups across space and time. We describe the dataset in detail, discuss its advantages and limitations, and use it in a replication of Cederman, Wimmer and Min’s (2010) study on the causes of ethno-nationalist conflict. We show that territorial conflicts are more likely to involve groups that settle far away from…
Territorial Autonomy in the Shadow of Conflict: Too Little, Too Late
This article evaluates the effect of territorial autonomy on the outbreak of internal conflict by analyzing ethnic groups around the world since WWII. Shedding new light on an ongoing debate, we argue that the critics have overstated the case against autonomy policies. Our evidence indicates that decentralization has a significant conflict-preventing effect where there is no prior conflict history. In postconflict settings, however, granting auto…
Who Inherits the State? Colonial Rule and Postcolonial Conflict
Postulating grievance‐based mechanisms, several recent studies show that politically excluded ethnic groups are more likely to experience civil conflict. However, critics argue that endogeneity may undermine this finding since governments' decisions to include or exclude could be motivated by the anticipation of conflict. We counter this threat to inference by articulating a causal pathway that explains ethnic groups' access to power independentl…
Transborder Ethnic Kin and Civil War
A series of studies has shown that civil wars are caused not only by factors inside countries, but also by effects operating across state borders. Whereas a first wave of quantitative studies demonstrated that such effects make the “closed-polity” assumption untenable, more recently researchers have identified particular causal mechanisms driving conflict. Despite these recent advances, a central puzzle remains unresolved, namely why ethnic group…
Power Sharing: Institutions, Behavior, and Peace
Grievances that derive from the unequal treatment of ethnic groups are a key motivation for civil war. Ethnic power sharing should therefore reduce the risk of internal conflict. Yet conflict researchers disagree on whether formal power‐sharing institutions effectively prevent large‐scale violence. We can improve our understanding of the effect of power‐sharing institutions by analyzing the mechanisms under which they operate. To this effect, we …
Predicting the decline of ethnic civil war: Was Gurr right and for the right reasons
Many scholars have detected a decrease of political violence, but the causes of this decline remain unclear. As a contribution to this debate, we revisit the controversy over trends in conflict after the end of the Cold War. While many made ominous predictions of surging ethnic warfare, Gurr presented evidence of a pacifying trend since the mid-1990s and predicted a further decline in ethnic conflict in an article on 'the waning of ethnic war'. L…
International Conventions and Nonstate Actors: Selection, Signaling, and Reputation Effects
Whether international humanitarian norms are respected during and after civil conflict depends on the behavior of both governments and nonstate actors (NSAs). However, international conventions on the protection of civilians generally do not address NSAs, as such conventions are open only to the representatives of states. In a pioneering initiative, the nongovernmental organization Geneva Call has started to address this problem by soliciting NSA…
Trojan Horse, Copycat, or Scapegoat? Unpacking the Refugees-Terrorism Nexus
Widespread fear that hosting refugees will mean more terrorism in host states is at the heart of the "refugee crisis." Yet, we lack rigorous evidence for such claims. This article theoretically unpacks how and under what conditions transnational refugee movements plausibly lead to different types of terrorist outcomes. Combining original data with a multipronged approach involving a treatment-placebo design as well as instrumental variable estima…
The Diffusion of Inclusion: An Open-Polity Model of Ethnic Power Sharing
While there is a growing consensus that ethnic inclusion produces peace, less is known about what causes transitions to power sharing between ethnic groups in central governments in multiethnic states. The few studies that have addressed this question have proposed explanations stressing exclusively domestic factors. Yet, power sharing is spatially clustered, which suggests that diffusion may be at play. Inspired by studies of democratic diffusio…
A Fast Estimator for Binary Choice Models with Spatial, Temporal, and Spatio-Temporal Interdependence
Binary outcome models are frequently used in the social sciences and economics. However, such models are difficult to estimate with interdependent data structures, including spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal autocorrelation because jointly determined error terms in the reduced-form specification are generally analytically intractable. To deal with this problem, simulation-based approaches have been proposed. However, these approaches (i) are…
Strategic rebels: A spatial econometric approach to rebel fighting durations in civil wars
Recent research on multi-actor civil wars highlights that rebel organizations condition their conflict behavior on that of other rebel organizations, with competition and free-riding constituting the core theoretical mechanisms. We provide a new actor-centric approach to explicitly model strategic interdependence in multi-actor civil wars. We argue that rebel organizations have incentives to remain mobilized until the end of a conflict to maintai…
Do Foreign Military Deployments Provide Assurance? Unpacking the Micro-Mechanisms of Burden Sharing in Alliances
How do US foreign military deployments impact the defense policies of host states? Dominant scholarship holds that these deployments play a pivotal role in assuring allies that their security is guaranteed, which in turn leads host countries to neglect their national defense contributions. In this research note, we examine the micro-foundations of this conventional wisdom, investigating how nuclear and conventional troop deployments impact attitu…
Precolonial and Colonial Origins of Inclusive Peace
In a recent contribution to this journal, Richard McAlexander seeks to reanalyze Wucherpfennig, Hunziker, and Cederman’s “Who Inherits the State?” which instruments the effect of ethnic group inclusion on civil conflict by exploiting differences in colonial governance between the French and British empires. McAlexander proposes a research design that replaces the between-colony dimension of Wucherpfennig et al.’s comparison with a continuous meas…
Executive Power Sharing in the Face of Civil War
Scholars have debated whether executive power sharing can secure peace in multiethnic states, but concerns about endogeneity due to reverse causation render this a difficult problem for empirical analyses. In the absence of a suitable instrumental variable, I explore an actor-based approach by studying a simple formal model. This highlights the conditions under which governments are likely to share power with a domestic challenger depending on th…
Inequalities Between Ethnic Groups, Conflict, and Political Organizations
We highlight that ethnic conflicts are typically about ‘nationality problems’ of self-rule, and thus best understood as ethno-nationalist conflicts that are driven by political and economic inequalities between groups. Recent, large-scale data collection and analysis find systematic evidence for such a link, but what is needed is a firmer understanding of the precise causal mechanisms, including ethnic mobilization processes through political org…
Polygyny or Misogyny? Reexamining the “First Law of Intergroup Conflict”
Kanazawa (2009) proposes a “first law of intergroup conflict”, suggesting that polygyny and its impact on access to reproductive women provides “the ultimate cause ” for civil war. This controversial claim is supported by an empirical analysis at odds with most existing studies of civil wars. We reconsider the influence of polygyny in a more conven-tional statistical model. We fail to find evidence that ethnic groups with polygyny engage more fre…
Politically Relevant Ethnic Groups across Space and Time: Introducing the GeoEPR Dataset
This article introduces GeoEPR, a geocoded version of the Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) dataset that charts politically relevant ethnic groups across space and time. We describe the dataset in detail, discuss its advantages and limitations, and use it in a replication of Cederman, Wimmer and Min’s (2010) study on the causes of ethno-nationalist conflict. We show that territorial conflicts are more likely to involve groups that settle far away from…
Ethnicity, the State, and the Duration of Civil War
Previous research has focused primarily on how ethnicity may trigger civil war, and its effect on conflict duration remains disputed. Rather than treating conflict as a direct consequence of ethnic cleavages, the authors argue that ethnicity per se does not affect civil war duration. Instead, its effect depends on its relationship to political institutions. They employ a dyadic approach that emphasizes the political context in which both governme…
Transborder Ethnic Kin and Civil War
A series of studies has shown that civil wars are caused not only by factors inside countries, but also by effects operating across state borders. Whereas a first wave of quantitative studies demonstrated that such effects make the “closed-polity” assumption untenable, more recently researchers have identified particular causal mechanisms driving conflict. Despite these recent advances, a central puzzle remains unresolved, namely why ethnic group…
Territorial Autonomy in the Shadow of Conflict: Too Little, Too Late
This article evaluates the effect of territorial autonomy on the outbreak of internal conflict by analyzing ethnic groups around the world since WWII. Shedding new light on an ongoing debate, we argue that the critics have overstated the case against autonomy policies. Our evidence indicates that decentralization has a significant conflict-preventing effect where there is no prior conflict history. In postconflict settings, however, granting auto…
Inequalities Between Ethnic Groups, Conflict, and Political Organizations
We highlight that ethnic conflicts are typically about ‘nationality problems’ of self-rule, and thus best understood as ethno-nationalist conflicts that are driven by political and economic inequalities between groups. Recent, large-scale data collection and analysis find systematic evidence for such a link, but what is needed is a firmer understanding of the precise causal mechanisms, including ethnic mobilization processes through political org…
Who Inherits the State? Colonial Rule and Postcolonial Conflict
Postulating grievance‐based mechanisms, several recent studies show that politically excluded ethnic groups are more likely to experience civil conflict. However, critics argue that endogeneity may undermine this finding since governments' decisions to include or exclude could be motivated by the anticipation of conflict. We counter this threat to inference by articulating a causal pathway that explains ethnic groups' access to power independentl…
Predicting the decline of ethnic civil war: Was Gurr right and for the right reasons
Many scholars have detected a decrease of political violence, but the causes of this decline remain unclear. As a contribution to this debate, we revisit the controversy over trends in conflict after the end of the Cold War. While many made ominous predictions of surging ethnic warfare, Gurr presented evidence of a pacifying trend since the mid-1990s and predicted a further decline in ethnic conflict in an article on 'the waning of ethnic war'. L…
International Conventions and Nonstate Actors: Selection, Signaling, and Reputation Effects
Whether international humanitarian norms are respected during and after civil conflict depends on the behavior of both governments and nonstate actors (NSAs). However, international conventions on the protection of civilians generally do not address NSAs, as such conventions are open only to the representatives of states. In a pioneering initiative, the nongovernmental organization Geneva Call has started to address this problem by soliciting NSA…
The Diffusion of Inclusion: An Open-Polity Model of Ethnic Power Sharing
While there is a growing consensus that ethnic inclusion produces peace, less is known about what causes transitions to power sharing between ethnic groups in central governments in multiethnic states. The few studies that have addressed this question have proposed explanations stressing exclusively domestic factors. Yet, power sharing is spatially clustered, which suggests that diffusion may be at play. Inspired by studies of democratic diffusio…
Power Sharing: Institutions, Behavior, and Peace
Grievances that derive from the unequal treatment of ethnic groups are a key motivation for civil war. Ethnic power sharing should therefore reduce the risk of internal conflict. Yet conflict researchers disagree on whether formal power‐sharing institutions effectively prevent large‐scale violence. We can improve our understanding of the effect of power‐sharing institutions by analyzing the mechanisms under which they operate. To this effect, we …
Strategic rebels: A spatial econometric approach to rebel fighting durations in civil wars
Recent research on multi-actor civil wars highlights that rebel organizations condition their conflict behavior on that of other rebel organizations, with competition and free-riding constituting the core theoretical mechanisms. We provide a new actor-centric approach to explicitly model strategic interdependence in multi-actor civil wars. We argue that rebel organizations have incentives to remain mobilized until the end of a conflict to maintai…
A Fast Estimator for Binary Choice Models with Spatial, Temporal, and Spatio-Temporal Interdependence
Binary outcome models are frequently used in the social sciences and economics. However, such models are difficult to estimate with interdependent data structures, including spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal autocorrelation because jointly determined error terms in the reduced-form specification are generally analytically intractable. To deal with this problem, simulation-based approaches have been proposed. However, these approaches (i) are…
Executive Power Sharing in the Face of Civil War
Scholars have debated whether executive power sharing can secure peace in multiethnic states, but concerns about endogeneity due to reverse causation render this a difficult problem for empirical analyses. In the absence of a suitable instrumental variable, I explore an actor-based approach by studying a simple formal model. This highlights the conditions under which governments are likely to share power with a domestic challenger depending on th…
Sharing Power, Securing Peace: Ethnic Inclusion and Civil War
Does power sharing bring peace? Policymakers around the world seem to think so. Yet, while there are many successful examples of power sharing in multi-ethnic states, such as Switzerland, South Africa and Indonesia, other instances show that such arrangements offer no guarantee against violent conflict, including Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Zimbabwe and South Sudan. Given this mixed record, it is not surprising that scholars disagree as to whether power …
Precolonial and Colonial Origins of Inclusive Peace
In a recent contribution to this journal, Richard McAlexander seeks to reanalyze Wucherpfennig, Hunziker, and Cederman’s “Who Inherits the State?” which instruments the effect of ethnic group inclusion on civil conflict by exploiting differences in colonial governance between the French and British empires. McAlexander proposes a research design that replaces the between-colony dimension of Wucherpfennig et al.’s comparison with a continuous meas…
Trojan Horse, Copycat, or Scapegoat? Unpacking the Refugees-Terrorism Nexus
Widespread fear that hosting refugees will mean more terrorism in host states is at the heart of the "refugee crisis." Yet, we lack rigorous evidence for such claims. This article theoretically unpacks how and under what conditions transnational refugee movements plausibly lead to different types of terrorist outcomes. Combining original data with a multipronged approach involving a treatment-placebo design as well as instrumental variable estima…
Do Foreign Military Deployments Provide Assurance? Unpacking the Micro-Mechanisms of Burden Sharing in Alliances
How do US foreign military deployments impact the defense policies of host states? Dominant scholarship holds that these deployments play a pivotal role in assuring allies that their security is guaranteed, which in turn leads host countries to neglect their national defense contributions. In this research note, we examine the micro-foundations of this conventional wisdom, investigating how nuclear and conventional troop deployments impact attitu…
The Return of Nationalist Geopolitics: Liberal Backsliding and Armed Conflict
The post-Cold War decline in violent conflict has given way to rising instability both within and between states. While many attribute this shift to intensified great power competition, we argue that nationalist geopolitics, manifested through conflict driven by grievances reflecting the political exclusion of ethnic groups and their kin, offer a more accurate explanation. We explain how endogenous and exogenous factors weakened the liberal inter…
Weapons of Mass Deterrence: How Nuclear Threats Succeed
Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022 has put nuclear security back in the spotlight, especially through Russian nuclear threats intended to undermine and deter European arms delivery to Ukraine, ranging from battle tanks to cruise missiles to fighter jets. While a growing body of literature has examined the conditions under which nuclear weapons use is publicly endorsed, surprisingly little is known about the recipient effects of nuclear threats. W…
Law (16 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (16 works) · Political science (16 works) · Political economy (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Economics (12 works) · Ethnic group (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Ethnic conflict (9 works) · Politics (9 works)