ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the literature on the link between the ethnic composition of countries and protest and rebellion. It discusses the determinants of the propensity of governments to respond to threats with coercion and the impact of democratization on ethnic mobilization and government response. The chapter describes research design and the data use to measure our concepts. Among multiple identities possessed by people, ethnicity is one of the most salient and thus serves as a potential mobilization cleavage. The argument behind a finding is simply that the level of dissident violence in a society is determined by the level of government repression in that society. A young democracy may not have all the necessary institutions in place to achieve an improvement on its human rights record, but it would definitely lack some of the repressive institutions it used for human rights violations.
