Children of Violence

At the Academy, Lupu will explore how experiences of political violence shape the political identities of victims and their descendants in order to understand what kinds of political violence have lasting intergenerational effects. His project draws on multi-generational surveys fielded in Crimea, Cambodia, and Guatemala, as well as additional data from survey projects on conflict experiences. The legacy of violent political events provides a link between the lasting psychological effects of exposure to violence long studied by social scientists, on the one hand, and the persistence of broader political phenomena like group attachments, partisanship, and even some political institutions more recently tackled by political scientists, on the other. “Social scientists have become so interested in uncovering these effects where they find them that they have neglected cases where the same effects do not obtain,” Lupu argues. In “Children of Violence,” co-authored with Leonid Peisakhin, he offers a fresh argument about what types of violence and conflict contexts do and do not leave lasting inter-generational effects on the political identities of victims and their descendants. Where political violence is targeted indiscriminately at members of an ethnic group, and where blame for that violence is easily attributable to an ethnic out-group, Lupu finds the strongest effects of experiences of violence on inter-generational identities and attitudes. In contrast, lasting effects following types of violence or conflict contexts in which targeting is more selective and blame attribution more ambiguous, are less evident.