Pre-Colonial and Colonial Origins of Inclusive Peace
- In a recent contribution to this journal, McAlexander (2020, hereafter McAlexander) seeks to re-analyze Wucherpfennig, Hunziker and Cederman (2016, hereafter WHC) who instrument the effect of ethnic group inclusion on civil conflict by exploiting differences in colonial governance between the French and the British empire. McAlexander proposes a research design that replaces the between-colony dimension of WHC’s comparison with a continuous measure of indirect rule that varies be-tween British colonies. We show that McAlexander’s study hardly poses a viable reanalysis because his approach is compromised by problems of ecological inference and post-treatment confounding, lead-ing to biased inference by design. We propose a more informative reanalysis, indicating that British colonialism built on suitable customary institutions, unlike the French empire. Although tentative, our analytical extension lends support to WHC’s original findings, most importantly that inclusion reduces the risk of post-colonial civil conflict.