Conflict over values that are at the heart of liberal democracy is thought to generate opposition to multiculturalism in Europe. Yet we do not know the full range of civic norms and values that Europeans expect immigrants to threaten, or how much European publics actually care about these values. This lecture explores the cultural foundations of opposition to immigration by presenting a simple framework to measure what we mean when we talk about “good citizenship” and to consider whether perceived threats to democratic norms actually explain native-immigrant conflict in Europe.
This lecture is part of the Department of Political Economy's Distinguished Lecture series. It will be followed by a reception.
SPEAKER
Nicholas Sambanis is Kalsi Professor of Political Science and Director of the Identity & Conflict Lab at Yale University. He writes on inter-group conflict, ranging from everyday forms of bias and discrimination to violent protests and civil wars. With Michael Doyle, he published Making War and Building Peace (Princeton University Press, 2006), the first quantitative analysis of the effectiveness of United Nations peacekeeping operations after civil war. He co-authored Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy (World Bank, 2003) a book which launched the study of civil war as a problem of economic development; and he designed and implemented the first multi-country mixed-methods research project on the causes of civil war in a two-volume book, Understanding Civil War: Evidence and Analysis (World Bank, 2005). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and his articles on civil war, secessionism, and ethnic conflict broadly defined have been published in leading academic journals. As a Presidential Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania from 2016-2023, he founded the Identity & Conflict Lab, which uses inter-disciplinary experimental research to explore ways that group identities shape political conflict and are in turn affected by conflict. His current research is focused on overcoming challenges of immigrant integration in Europe and he is the co-author of Native Bias: Overcoming Discrimination Against Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2022).
