A converation with Fotini Christia Associate Professor of Political Science at MIT to celebrate the launch of NYU’s new undergraduate minor in Peace and Coflict Studies.

The relationship between ethnic fractionalization and lower availability of public goods and services is now treated as an empirical regularity. Using a pool of over 300 participants from paired Sunni and Shia neighborhoods in the highly sectarian context of contemporary Iraq, we conduct a novel small-world network experiment in which participants are randomly assigned to obtain information about local government offices in Sunni- or Shia-dominated target areas. Contrary to expectations, we find that the politically dominant majority Shia group is substantially less able to access public services than the minority Sunni group, which appears to have developed better strategies for obtaining resources to which it would otherwise be denied access.

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