Conflicting Explanations in Ethnic Violence Studies

There is a well-developed scholarship that seeks to make sense of why violence occurs between different ethnic groups. It generally sees ethnic violence as a particular type of conflict defined by two characteristics. First, differences in ethnic identity are a primary motivation for the violent action (e.g., Brubaker and Laitin Reference Brubaker and Laitin1998: 428). Second, the violence is one-sided in that it targets everyday civilians who are not organized into an armed or political group. These criteria distinguish ethnic violence from other forms of conflict, including civil wars, rebellions, insurgencies, or criminal violence.Footnote ² These two criteria further point scholars toward a fundamental problem that motivates much of the literature: What are the conditions under which tensions between members of rival ethnic groups spill over into overt violence? To answer this question, the literature has forwarded a range of explanations that can be broadly grouped into three categories: those focused on political competition, those stressing social and economic relations, and those centered on the state and its coercive apparatus.

A first cluster of explanations proposes that ethnic violence has a political calculus. Violence may be an effective means to demobilize opponents, rally supporters, and elevate the salience of ethnic differences ahead of elections (Dhattiwala and Biggs Reference Dhattiwala and Biggs2012; Toha Reference Toha2017; Wilkinson Reference Wilkinson2006). It may also occur when ethnic groups begin to develop autonomous political power through superior organizational or mobilizational skills (Dancygier Reference Dancygier2010). Often these explanations focus on the mobilizational role of political entrepreneurs who use ethnically charged speech to heighten animosities between groups, provide explicit or tacit encouragement to assailants, or even directly organize followers to participate in attacks (Hardin Reference Hardin1997; Karapin Reference Karapin2002; Wilkinson Reference Wilkinson2006). These accounts often find that ethnic violence occurs around important political events, such as elections or government changes. It may also occur as “backlash” (Francisco Reference Francisco2004) following major acts of state repression, whereby political actors target outgroups aligned with the state whom they scapegoat for the crackdown. These backlashes can also occur when groups have been excluded from democratization processes, which they attribute to the complicity of an ethnic minority (Brooke and Nugent Reference Brooke and Nugent2020).

A second cluster of explanations examines society-level relations between ethnic groups. An influential variant of this argument emphasizes the importance of deeply embedded identity dynamics within episodes of ethnic violence (Horowitz Reference Horowitz1985, Reference Horowitz2001; Petersen Reference Petersen2002); a related strand has looked more at the structure of institutions or relations in society that might serve to ameliorate these types of tensions (Fearon and Laitin Reference Fearon and Laitin1996; Kopstein and Wittenberg Reference Kopstein and Wittenberg2011). For example, Varshney’s (Reference Varshney2003) study of anti-Muslim riots in India shows that cross-ethnic associational ties tend to mitigate violence (see also Jha Reference Jha2013). If these studies emphasize the importance of economic institutions for reducing tensions, other scholars have pointed to the centrality of economic competition between ethnic groups (Dancygier Reference Dancygier2010; Esteban and Ray Reference Esteban and Ray2011; Olzak Reference Olzak1992; Sniderman et al. Reference Sniderman, Pierangelo, De Figueiredo and Piazza2002).

The third cluster of arguments focuses on the institution supposedly responsible for restraining or curtailing ethnic violence: the state. State coercive actors, like the police, are entrusted with protecting ethnic minorities from predation by majority groups. But in contexts where state capacity is weak, coercive agents may lack the means to effectively restrain attackers (Kalyvas Reference Kalyvas2006; Petersen Reference Petersen2002). In other cases, coercive agents may lack the will to enforce order, either because they have a low level of commitment to their jobs, they harbor ethnic animosities of their own, or they see disorder as a means to stoke political polarization (Karapin Reference Karapin2002; Wilkinson Reference Wilkinson2006).

Of course, it is not surprising that research on a complex political phenomenon like ethnic violence has identified no single explanatory variable. Still, the range and diversity of arguments in the literature are striking. Some of these explanations generate predictions that are directly contradictory. For example, some studies find that strong ethnic leaders discourage violence to preserve intercommunal harmony (Fearon and Laitin Reference Fearon and Laitin1996), whereas others argue that these same leaders encourage violence to achieve political gain (Wilkinson Reference Wilkinson2006). Although differences in findings could stem from analysis of disparate cases, in some instances rival explanations emerge from examination of the same case and occasionally even the very same dataset. The most famous example is the debate between Wilkinson (Reference Wilkinson2006) and Varshney (Reference Varshney2003), who came to starkly different conclusions after analyzing the same data on ethnic riots in India—the former privileging political and state-centric factors, the latter preferring a societal explanation.

We believe that such diverse and contradictory accounts are indicative of a conceptual problem in this literature. Following Sartori (Reference Sartori1970) who cautioned against conceptual lumping and stretching, we propose that scholars are studying ethnic violence at too high a level of aggregation, grouping together different types of violence that in fact have distinct underlying processes, even if the targets share a common ethnic hue. In other words, even though narrowing the scope of analysis to specifically ethnic violence has allowed scholars to focus on a common problem—the conditions under which ethnic tensions escalate into conflict—there is still too much diversity within this category of “ethnic violence” to yield coherent and parsimonious theory.

A brief survey of the different forms of action that scholars have analyzed under the heading of ethnic violence confirms this intuition. Many studies use the “ethnic riot” as the unit of analysis, typically defined as an attack by one ethnic group against another (Horowitz Reference Horowitz2001; Toha Reference Toha2017; Varshney Reference Varshney2003; Wilkinson Reference Wilkinson2006). Others consider the phenomenon of pogroms (Dhatiwalla and Biggs Reference Dhattiwala and Biggs2012; Kopstein and Wittenberg Reference Kopstein and Wittenberg2011), presumably more deliberate or organized campaigns to inflict mass casualties on a minority group (though the distinction between riots and pogroms is not clear). Some scholars lump together different forms of violence in the same study. For example, Olzak (Reference Olzak1992, 6) studies “ethnic collective action,” which she defines as “a public action of two or more persons that articulates a distinctly ethnic (or racial) claim, expresses a grievance, or attacks members of another ethic group (or property).” Here, then, we have action that is nonviolent (e.g., a protest) and violent (e.g., a riot), targeted against both individuals and properties, all bundled together. Following Olzak, Varshney (Reference Varshney2003) and Wilkinson (Reference Wilkinson2006) define an ethnic riot as an event involving violence in which two or more communally identified groups confront each other—a definition that encompasses large- and small-scale attacks against both individuals and properties from the opposing group, using various levels of arms (see Wilkinson Reference Wilkinson2006: 255–56). Dancygier (Reference Dancygier2010) similarly groups together various forms of immigrant-related violence, including relatively isolated racist attacks by one or several individuals and large-scale riots aimed at physical property destruction. Given the diversity in these forms of ethnic violence—from isolated attacks against a single victim, to mass pogroms, to well-planned armed attacks—it is no wonder that the literature has come up with so many competing arguments.

A handful of studies do note differences in the forms of ethnic violence. For example, Karapin’s (Reference Karapin2002) article on antiminority violence in Germany distinguishes between “small-scale violence” and larger “antiminority riots,” interrogating why the former sometimes telescope into the latter. Paul Brass (Reference Brass1997) asks a similar question in India: Why do small parochial incidents (like “the theft of an idol”) sometimes escalate into large-scale riots or pogroms? But these studies do not develop full typologies of violence, nor do they systematize these differences by applying them to empirical data. Nor have they prompted the scholarship more broadly to embrace disaggregation in their studies. We find this puzzling, because prominent voices in the ethnic violence field have been calling for disaggregation for quite some time. For example, Brubaker and Laitin (Reference Brubaker and Laitin1998, 446) cautioned against defining a “research program around an aggregated notion of ethnic violence.” In their “plea for disaggregation,” they argue that ethnic violence is “composite and causally heterogeneous” and “involve[s] sharply opposed mechanisms and dynamics” (446). As such, we should forego attempts at elaborating universal theories of such violence and instead “analyze, and explain the heterogenous processes and mechanisms involved in generating the varied instances of what we all too casually lump together—given our prevailing ethnicizing interpretive frames—as ‘ethnic violence’” (447). Horowitz (Reference Horowitz2001, 27–28) has made a similar point: it will “not be possible to know which conditions are common and which are distinctive if we begin with a dependent variable based on merged phenomena.”

Further, we note that there has been considerable theoretical payoff from disaggregation in adjacent literatures. Recognizing the limitations of country-level analyses of civil wars, scholars in this field have embraced disaggregation at the level of ethnic groups, spatial units of analysis, and (most analogous to our study) characteristics of conflict (Cederman and Gleditsch Reference Cederman and Gleditsch2009). For example, Kalyvas (Reference Kalyvas2006) argues that in civil wars discriminate and indiscriminate violence follow different logics and require different theories: the latter is a function of power asymmetries and information/resource scarcity, whereas the former occurs through a process of denunciation and counter-denunciation. Similarly, Balcells (Reference Balcells2017) argues that indirect violence against civilians in civil wars follows a military logic, whereas direct violence occurs in collaboration with local civilians who seek to consolidate political control. Disaggregation has also been embraced in the contentious politics field (e.g., McAdam et al. Reference McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly2001). For example, Bishara (Reference Bishara2021) argues that certain forms of contention are more capable of deepening and broadening movements than others.

With these successful examples in mind, we propose it is high time to answer the calls made by Brubaker, Laitin, Horowitz, and others. Even though the scholarship on ethnic violence has made significant headway in unearthing the factors that spur this form of conflict, the coherence of its contributions has been muddied by analysis of the phenomenon at too high a level of aggregation. We therefore propose moving one rung down Sartori’s proverbial ladder— essentially, to paraphrase Horowitz, “un-merging” the dependent variable—which we believe will allow for better alignment of theory with outcomes. In the next section we advance one approach by which scholars might go about such a disaggregation.

Disaggregating Ethnic Violence

In this section we propose a typology for disaggregating ethnic violence, which, following the existing literature, we understand as one-sided violence against civilians in which ethnic differences are the main motivation for action. The typology is based on two criteria: the target of the violence and the level of arms used (figure 1). We select these criteria because they are both substantively meaningful—they capture important differences in the forms and functions of violence, including the aims of that violence and its level of organization, and empirically tractable: they are easy to apply based on even cursory or limited information about an event.

Figure 1

A typology of ethnic violence

We begin by differentiating attacks by their target. Those against properties owned by members of another ethnic community (like arson or looting) we term “burnings,” and those against individuals from another ethnic group (like assaults or kidnappings) we term “beatings.” The target of an attack says something important about the motivations of the attackers. An attack against a specific individual or group of individuals likely has a retributive rationale; it entails that ethnic hostilities are narrow and focused and that the intention of the violence is to punish an individual or group of individuals for some supposed wrongdoing. In contrast, an attack against a physical property associated with an ethnic group is more likely to be motivated by a desire to inflict harm on the entire community or population, rather than some specific individuals. Such physical properties typically have symbolic significance, particularly if they are cultural sites or places of worship, and their desecration or destruction is often undertaken with the aim of collective punishment. In this sense, by distinguishing between the target of ethnic attacks we capture meaningful differences in whom they are meant to punish: the collective or the individual.

The second axis of disaggregation is the level of violence used. Drawing on Tilly’s (Reference Tilly2003) work on collective violence, we distinguish between armed violence, which inflicts damage on an ethnic group using firearms or explosives, and unarmed violence, which inflicts harm using improvised weapons (e.g., clubs, knives, or fists). We refer to armed attacks as “bombings,” which captures both attacks using bombs and those using guns, such as shootings or assassinations.Footnote ³ We believe this distinction is important because it captures important differences in the perpetrator’s level of organization. Indeed, Kadivar and Ketchley (Reference Kadivar and Ketchley2018) point out that armed and unarmed attacks are generally undertaken by markedly different types of actors. In the context of ethnic violence, we expect that armed attacks require some sponsoring organization to furnish the weapons and bombs, which are not readily available to most civilians. In contrast, unarmed attacks will, by and large, be perpetrated by less organized actors, who draw on improvised weapons like sticks, clubs, stones, knives, and fists. Further, in contrast to armed violence, which requires some level of prior planning to procure and distribute the weapons, unarmed violence can emerge rapidly and spontaneously, because assailants rely on whatever is readily at hand.

Importantly, for reasons of parsimony, we choose not to subdivide armed violence according to the target of the attack (as we do with unarmed violence). We believe that the main relevant factor here is whether arms are used or not, which implies a certain level of organizational backing. Although in some cases armed attacks against individuals (e.g., assassinations) versus against buildings (e.g., explosions) could operate according to different logics—perhaps mirroring the difference between discriminate and indiscriminate violence in the civil wars or terrorism scholarship—here we choose to maintain a simpler three-part typology.Footnote ⁴

There are other ways that one might disaggregate ethnic violence. For example, per the previous point, armed attacks could be subdivided according to target, creating a four-part typology. Another obvious move would be to differentiate according to the perpetrator of the violence: a political party, a rebel group, unorganized civilians, and so on. Or, one could imagine operationalizing the scale of violence with a measure of the number of participants involved. The problem with the last two criteria is that they can be difficult to implement in the actual coding of cases. It is often unclear whether a particular group or sponsor is behind an attack, because they may want to keep this information hidden.Footnote ⁵ We also found in our data that the number of participants in an attack is often omitted or unreliable in the reporting of the incident. Furthermore, we believe that our categorization scheme captures some of the most important differences in perpetrator and scale. We have already discussed how the level of violence (armed vs. unarmed) tells us something about the level of organization behind the attack, because the arms must be furnished by someone. As for scale, it is fair to assume that attacks against a single person or a small number of individuals will involve fewer assailants, whereas unarmed attacks against properties require the mobilization of large mobs or crowds, who can surround a building and overwhelm security forces.

Because our categorization scheme captures meaningful differences in the motivations for and the organization of violence, we believe that these different types of attacks will be generated by distinct processes. Specifically, we argue that each of the different theories of ethnic violence reviewed here will be better able to explain some forms of violence than others.

First, we expect burnings to be associated with political factors. Assailants target the buildings of an ethnic community when they want to inflict collective punishment on the whole group. Such acts of collective victimization are likely to be particularly effective in heightening ethnic cleavages and driving a wedge between entire ethnic communities, which the literature tells us is often the goal of political entrepreneurs. Moreover, burnings usually require a degree of collective action, with mobs or groups of assailants engaging in looting or arson. They therefore require someone to mobilize these mobs and spur them into action, and political entrepreneurs can provide this type of mobilizational capacity. We therefore believe that burnings will be more likely to occur where political entrepreneurs are more powerful and when they have a strong motivation to incite ethnic attacks. For example, they might use violence to exacerbate ethnic cleavages and gain a political edge in places where political control is especially contested. Or, following the literature on backlashes (Francisco Reference Francisco2004), they might incite attacks in response to a major state crackdown, particularly if non-co-ethnics are perceived to be in alliance with the state. We propose the following hypotheses:

• • H1a: Burnings are more likely where political entrepreneurs and their affiliated organizations are stronger.

• • H1b: Burnings are more likely in places with more political competition.

• • H1c: Burnings are more likely following major acts of state repression.

Next, we expect beatings to be more closely associated with socioeconomic factors. Because beatings entail unarmed attacks against specific individuals, they usually have a punitive rationale; they are intended to redress a particular grievance against an individual or group of individuals for some perceived affront. In the literature, social and economic factors, such as economic competition, are expected to generate violence precisely because they increase intercommunal tensions and make these types of perceived affronts more likely. Residents will scapegoat and blame their non-co-ethnic neighbors when material hardships and competition increase over scarce resources. Further, such intercommunal grievances and tensions are likely to be heightened during religious holidays, when cultural sensitivities are more acute. Finally, following Varshney (Reference Varshney2003), we would expect these kinds of social and cultural tensions to become explosive in places where intercommunal relations and networks between ethnic groups are particularly weak. We therefore derive the following three hypotheses:

• • H2a: Beatings are more likely during periods of economic competition.

• • H2b: Beatings are more likely during religious holidays.

• • H2c: Beatings are more likely where cross-ethnic intercommunal relations are weak.

Bombings require that an organized group acquire and furnish the firearms and explosives used. Though we might envision various organized groups—such as state actors, rebel groups, and so on—providing these arms, one obvious candidate would be terrorist groups, particularly those organized around identity or religion. Terrorism has often been analyzed separately from ethnic violence, but many terrorist groups do target ethnic minorities and are connected to long-term dynamics of interethnic hostilities (Sidel Reference Sidel2006). As the literature on terrorism has shown, these groups tend to use violence in a highly strategic way (Byman Reference Byman1998; Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1981; McCormick Reference McCormick2003). They tend to attack symbolically important sites with spectacular acts of violence intended to maximize the number of civilian casualties; these acts serve simultaneously to incite fear in minority communities, increase the exposure of the terrorist group, and radicalize and mobilize potential supporters. Moreover, scholars have found that Islamist terrorists reduce their attacks during Muslim holidays due to elevated levels of societal disapproval of violence (Reese, Ruby, and Pape Reference Reese, Ruby and Pape2017). We expect bombings to be patterned by similar dynamics. Specifically, we derive the following hypotheses:

• • H3a: Bombings are more likely where terrorist groups have an organizational presence.

• • H3b: Bombings are more likely in highly visible and symbolically significant locations.

• • H3c: Bombings are less likely during Muslim religious holidays.

Finally, because the state might plausibly protect ethnic groups from any type of attack, we expect that when state actors are either unable or unwilling to do their jobs it may facilitate all three types of violence (Wilkinson Reference Wilkinson2006). This allows us to derive our final hypothesis:

• • H4: Burnings, beatings, and bombings are more likely where the state’s coercive capacity is weak.

In the following sections we evaluate these hypotheses and probe the extent to which our categorization scheme captures meaningful differences in ethnic violence in an important case: Egypt from 2013 to 2018.

Ethnic Violence in Egypt, 2013–2018

As a first step toward evaluating our argument about disaggregation, we begin by descriptively and qualitatively analyzing recent trends in anti-Christian violence in Egypt. Egypt is a country with a politicized ethnic cleavage, an imbalance in ethnic power, and a history of ethnic conflict, making it fairly emblematic of ethnic politics in many postcolonial states of the Global South (Clarke Reference Clarke2017). Egypt’s Muslim majority is dominant politically: according to the Ethnic Power Relations dataset Muslims are a monopoly power and Christians are “powerless,” an ethnic power dynamic that characterizes 44 other states in the dataset (Cederman, Wimmer, and Min Reference Cederman, Wimmer and Min2010).Footnote ⁶ And like many of these other states (e.g., Guatemala, Rwanda, Armenia, and Malaysia), for much of its modern history Egypt has seen recurring incidents of nonstate attacks against its Christian minority community.

We analyze anti-Christian violence in Egypt from 2013 to 2018, the period directly following Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s counterrevolutionary coup and reimposition of authoritarianism after the 2011 revolution. As we explain in detail, this period captures both an extraordinary period of violence directly following the coup and a more “normal” period from 2014 to 2018, which resembles levels of violence observed before the revolution. We consider the inclusion of both periods in our analysis a strength, because it allows us to show more clearly that ethnic violence follows different logics in different times and takes different forms.Footnote ⁷

We analyze descriptive trends in ethnic violence over this period using our catalog of anti-Christian events, which we introduce more fully in the data and methods section. We find initial evidence that all four of the major theories laid out earlier—political, socioeconomic, terrorist, and state-driven—were operative in Egypt over this period. We further find some suggestive evidence that these theories better explain certain types of violence, though we leave the more systematic examination of this question to the next section.

Political Violence and State Inaction following the Rabaa Massacre

Christians were active participants in Egypt’s 2011 revolution, which overthrew the decades-old military autocracy headed by Hosni Mubarak (Abdelrahman Reference Abdelrahman2014; Clarke Reference Clarke2014; El-Ghobashy Reference El-Ghobashy2011). Indeed, during the revolution Tahrir Square was heralded as a space of striking cross-confessional solidarity. But this sense of national unity quickly faded away after Mubarak stepped down, as Egyptians set about the messy business of constructing a new political regime. In the first months of the transition, anti-Christian attacks occurred in Helwan, Qena, and Imbaba (Brownlee Reference Brownlee2013; Tadros Reference Tadros2013). Egypt’s Coptic community became increasingly concerned by the growing power of domestic Islamist forces, especially the Muslim Brotherhood. As this group swept elections and then set about drafting a new constitution, Christians came to fear that they were witnessing the emergence of a permanent Islamist hegemony in Egypt. Coptic elites were therefore some of the most active participants in the counterrevolutionary movement that paved the way for Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s July 2013 coup, which ousted Morsi and restored military rule (Clarke Reference Clarke2020; Holmes Reference Holmes2019).

The coup set in motion a series of political events that culminated in a surge of ethnic violence against Egypt’s Christians in August 2013. We can see this spike clearly in figure 2, which plots the number of ethnic attacks per month from July 2013 to December 2018. When Morsi was ousted, the Muslim Brotherhood responded with massive street mobilization; hundreds of thousands of their followers converged on a square in front of Rabaa al-Adwiyya mosque in Cairo and swore not to leave until Morsi had been restored (Biagini and Ardovini Reference Biagini and Ardovini2022; Ketchley Reference Ketchley2017). On August 14 the military-led government reacted with a bloody crackdown, killing approximately 1,150 people (Human Rights Watch 2014). In response, local Muslim Brotherhood branches and allied Islamist groups went on the attack. One of their targets was Christian communities, whose members they blamed for backing the coup and enabling the massacre of their supporters. Event data indicate that individuals associated with these groups were implicated in 129 attacks after the Rabaa Massacre, many of which targeted Christian churches. Moreover, though these attacks were triggered by political events in the capital, the violence was national in scale, occurring in 16 of Egypt’s 27 governorates, with a concentration in the more heavily Christian governorates of Upper Egypt (e.g., Minya, Asyut, and Beni Souef).

Figure 2

Anti-Christian attacks, July 2013–December 2018

A report published in the aftermath of these attacks by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) provides rich qualitative insight into the central role of political entrepreneurs from the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups in orchestrating this violence. The report summarized the events as follows: “Most of the churches were set on fire by marchers supporting the deposed president, and some of the marches set out from sit-ins, as in cities in Minya, Assyout, and Sohag. In other cases, such as in cities and districts in Fayyoum, Minya, and Giza, appeals went out to attack churches from mosques known to be dominated by Islamist currents” (EIPR 2014, 95).

The EIPR report also includes firsthand accounts from individuals who witnessed the attacks. For example, the priest of the Mar Girgis Church in Minya described an assault on a Christian orphanage: “What happened is that on Wednesday, 12 August, the day they cleared the Nahda and Rabaa sit-ins, a huge group of terroristsFootnote ⁸ came and attacked the place here. As you can see, the building here was burned to the ground with everything inside it, after they took whatever they could carry. It was an organized operation, first looting and theft then burn it down” (EIPR 2014, 97). In addition to churches and other communal sites, the report also discusses the deliberate targeting of Coptic-owned homes and businesses by similar crowds of Morsi supporters.

A second important source of insight on the attacks comes from an unpublished report written by the Egypt-based researcher Steve Negus, based on field research conducted nine months after the episode (Negus Reference Negus2014). It focuses on the Upper Egyptian governorate of Minya, where the three episodes discussed in this article’s introduction took place. Minya has long been an epicenter of anti-Christian violence in Egypt due to an explosive mix of demographic conditions: it is both an Islamist stronghold and yet hosts the largest proportion of Christians of any governorate in Egypt: Christians make up one-third of its population (3–5). In our dataset it is the governorate with the largest number of violent events, both during the Rabaa week and otherwise. Negus’s reporting confirms that the anti-Christian attacks in the governorate after Rabaa were instigated by supporters of Mohamed Morsi and mosque preachers aligned with the Brotherhood. Moreover, witnesses he interviewed confirmed that “the attackers were more interested in burning and in looting computers, wiring, and other valuables from the churches than in attacking people” (19). He also found that, by and large, these attacks did not involve weapons: “while some people might have brought arms to the attacks, these were crowd assaults, not armed assaults” (20).

Finally, Negus found considerable evidence that the lack of state coercive capacity, specifically police inaction, allowed the violence to spiral out of control. Local police forces in the south had been cowed by the experience of the 2011 revolution. Their disillusionment only increased when Morsi was elected president, because many police officers have long-standing animosities toward the Muslim Brotherhood. During the Rabaa violence, Negus (Reference Negus2014, 19) reported that many police forces lacked the confidence and resolve to confront the Islamists, holing up in their stations or abandoning them entirely. The EIPR report (2014, 105) also notes that the performance of the security forces during the attacks was “characterized by sluggishness and inaction.” The report further documents incidents in which police were not only slow to respond but also actively facilitated attacks against Christians (93).

Anti-Christian Terrorism

In addition to politically motivated riots and small-scale parochial attacks, the trends in our data point to a third wave of ethnic violence that was operative in Egypt during this period. Figure 3 plots the number of monthly deaths from sectarian violence from July 2013 to December 2018. In contrast to figure 2, which showed a relatively steady rate of incidents from 2014 to 2018, this figure shows a striking increase in the intensity of violence beginning in late 2016, with spikes in deaths occurring in December 2016, April 2017, and May 2017.

Figure 3

Christian deaths from ethnic violence, July 2013–December 2018

The trend can be attributed to a wave of terrorist violence staged by the Islamist militant group Ansar Beit al-Maqdis (ABM), which was formed in the Sinai Peninsula immediately after the 2011 revolution. Militants took advantage of the collapse of the security state to essentially take control of large parts of the Sinai, and they soon began staging attacks against security forces, infrastructure, and civilians. These attacks increased in the aftermath of the 2013 coup, as the organization began to recruit more followers from among the disillusioned supporters of the Morsi government (Awad and Hashem Reference Awad and Hashem2015). Then in November 2014 ABM publicly declared allegiance to the Islamic State and began staging increasingly audacious attacks against Egypt’s security forces, which the group considered its primary enemy (Awad and Hashem Reference Awad and Hashem2015; Jumet and Gulmohamad Reference Jumet and Gulmohamad2020). The organization also attacked Coptic communities, bombing Coptic churches and staging armed assaults on groups of Copts.

Overall, then, this analysis suggests that, from 2013 to 2018, Egypt was racked by multiple distinct types of ethnic violence. First, after the massacre of Islamists in Rabaa Square on August 14, 2013, there was an outburst of politically motivated and state-facilitated rioting in which Morsi supporters targeted sites of communal importance to Christians. Second was the persistent targeting of Christians in low-scale attacks and kidnappings prompted often by perceived affronts to communal and social norms. Third, there was a surge in militant-sponsored attacks on Christian religious sites and communities intended to maximize casualties and incite a sectarian war. In other words, we see that all four of the major explanations for ethnic violence seem to have been operative, to some degree, in Egypt during this period. We also have some early evidence that the factors highlighted in these explanations were associated with different types of attacks (e.g., many burnings occurred during the politically motivated post-Rabaa wave of violence). To examine these relationships more systematically we turn next to a statistical analysis of these same violence patterns.

Data and Method

Our principal data source for the statistical analysis is the Eshhad catalog of anti-Christian attacks in Egypt over 2013–18 (the same dataset used to create the plots in figures 2 and 3). The catalog draws on more than 50 Arabic- and English-language news sources.Footnote ¹⁰ We cleaned these data and assigned each event to its census district. Given the potential for “news holes” (Oliver and Maney Reference Oliver and Maney2000) during periods of upheaval, we expanded the dataset for the intense period of violence after the Rabaa massacre using human rights reports compiled by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and Human Rights Watch. These sources yielded 54 additional events. We also removed some events from the Eshhad dataset, either because they were difficult to verify (e.g., entries sourced from Facebook posts) or because they did not meet the criteria for an ethnic attack. Ultimately, we ended up with a dataset of 413 anti-Christian attacks, which we reproduce in table C1 in the online appendix.

For each event the dataset recorded the date of its occurrence, the location (governorate and district), the number killed and injured, and the main narrative details. We used these narrative details, as well as the underlying source text, to code each event into our three ethnic violence categories. The following definitions guided our coding: burnings were defined as events in which improvised weapons were used to inflict damage on physical property,Footnote ¹¹ beatings as events in which improvised weapons were used to inflict harm on individuals, and bombings as events in which firearms or explosives were used to inflict harm on individuals or physical property. Typically, events could easily be assigned to one of these three categories. For example, the type of target that had been attacked was usually clear; a narrative would explicitly mention that a building had been mobbed, burned, or looted or that an individual person had been abducted or beaten. For those events where individuals were injured during an attack on a building, the event was still coded as a “burning” because the main target of the attack was a property. The only borderline cases (which were rare) occurred when an individual was hurt in front of or in the vicinity of a building, and it was unclear whether the building or the person was the main target of the attack. Determining whether weapons were used was even more straightforward; whenever a narrative mentioned that a firearm or bomb was used, we coded the event as a “bombing.” The only borderline cases (which, again, were rare) were those in which assailants carried weapons but did not use them or they fired their weapons into the air. As an indication of the ease with which our typology could be applied, three coders independently reached consensus on 94% of the events. For the 29 events about which coders disagreed, mostly due to ambiguities like those just noted, we used the categorization agreed on by two of the three coders.

Dependent Variable

To assess how different geographic and temporal predictors explain the three categories of ethnic violence that we laid out, let y be the dependent variable with J nominal categories coded as “2” for a district-day that witnessed a burning, “3” a district-day that witnessed a beating, and “4” for one that witnessed a bombing. The base category (set as “1”) records district-days on which no event took place. This is naturally analyzed using multinomial logistic regression, where the occurrence of sectarian violence in district (i) located in a governorate (g) on a given day (t) is predicted as

$$ \Pr \left({\mathrm{y}}_{\mathrm{igt}}\hskip0.35em =\hskip0.35em \mathrm{m}|\;{\mathrm{x}}_{\mathrm{igt}}\right)\hskip0.35em =\hskip0.35em \frac{\exp \left({\mathrm{x}}_{\mathrm{kigt}}{\unicode{x03B2}}_{\mathrm{m}}\right)}{1+{\sum}_{\mathrm{j}\hskip0.35em =\hskip0.35em 2}^{\mathrm{J}}\exp \left({\mathrm{x}}_{\mathrm{kigt}}{\unicode{x03B2}}_{\mathrm{m}}\right)}\hskip0.33em \mathrm{for}\hskip0.5em \mathrm{m}>1 $$

where m is the specific event type to be predicted, and x_k is a vector of time-varying and time-invariant independent variables measured at the district and governorate levels. Our data structure is thus a hierarchical panel, and so two-way standard errors are clustered on the governorate and district. As an early indication that our categories were capturing meaningful differences in types of violence, a Wald test confirmed that these outcome categories are statistically distinct from one another (p < 0.001) as a function of x_k.