ECMI RESEARCH SEMINAR: Matthias vom Hau
The ECMI invites you to participate in a research seminar with Matthias vom Hau.
Title of talk:
Politics of Cultural Exclusion: Language Status Loss and the Persistence of Ethnic Conflict
Cultural status grievances—arising from the denial of recognition of groups’ cultural practices and identities—are a neglected driver of civil war. This study examines language-based grievances as a particularly salient form of cultural status grievance, focusing on state-imposed exclusion from public education. Drawing on the Nation-Building Policies (NBP) dataset (1945–2020), we construct group-level indicators of language recognition and exclusion matched with group-level conflict indicators for 907 politically relevant ethnic groups across 162 countries. Progressive model specifications reveal that the naive association between language exclusion and conflict is almost entirely driven by between-country confounding. But this is not a null finding; rather it reframes the research question. A sharp onset–incidence asymmetry clarifies the operative mechanism: language downgrade carries no significant predictive power over conflict initiation but is robustly associated with conflict persistence, consistent with a dynamic in which symbolic grievances sustain rather than ignite armed mobilization. Granger-type tests further suggest a reciprocal cycle in which states respond to insurgency with linguistic repression, deepening the grievances that maintain it. Notably, groups whose languages were never taught during their time under observation display no increased likelihood of conflict—it is the reversal of previously recognized status, not the baseline absence of recognition, that carries mobilizing force. These findings shift the question from “does cultural exclusion cause conflict?” to “under what conditions does cultural status loss become a mobilizable grievance?”
Speaker:
Matthias vom Hau is an associate professor of comparative politics at IBEI. He holds a PhD in sociology from Brown University and previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Manchester.
He has been a visiting researcher at Princeton University and the Free University in Berlin. His research explores the intersections between identity politics, institutions, and development and has been published in leading journals such as Theory and Society, the American Journal of Sociology, Comparative Political Studies and Nations and Nationalism.
Until April 2026 he was the Principal Investigator of an ERC-funded research project that examined variations in nation-building from a global perspective, and their causes and consequences.