Cascades of Ethnic Polarization: Lessons from Yugoslavia

By building upon cascades literature, the author offers an explanation for rapid and massive polarization and applies it to the former Yugoslavia. The dominant images of ethnic categories in society change through cascades of individual reactions triggered by traumatic events, ideological shifts, or the activities of ethnic entrepreneurs. Polarization becomes self-propagating if the protagonists of a certain image of ethnic identities, called the divisive image, appear to have reached a critical mass. Downward ethnic preference falsification, people's concealment of their support for the divisive image in public, increases the severity of polarization. The article argues that downward falsification was significant in Yugoslavia before the 1980s due to policies that suppressed the public expression of the divisive image but insufficiently encouraged its elimination in private. In the 1980s, polarization reversed this trend and led to widespread upward ethnic preference falsification, the exaggeration of the support for the divisive image in public.

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