ARTICLE
The Legacy of Political Violence across Generations
For their comments and advice, we thank Laia Balcells, Natalia Bueno, Geoff Dancy, Evgeny Finkel, Scott Gehlbach, Ted Gerber, Francesca Grandi, Lynn Hancock, Evan Lieberman, Kyle Marquardt, Kristin Michelitch, Monika Nalepa, Richard Niemi, Ellie Powell, Jonathan Renshon, Luis Schiumerini, Nadav Shelef, Matt Singer, Scott Straus, Josh Tucker, Jason Wittenberg, Libby Wood, three anonymous reviewers at the AJPS, and seminar participants at American, GW, MIT, NYU‐Abu Dhabi, Pontifical Catholic University in Chile, Di Tella, ITAM, Vanderbilt, Wisconsin, and Yale. Rachel Schwartz provided excellent research assistance. This research was approved by Institutional Review Boards at New York University‐Abu Dhabi and University of Wisconsin‐Madison. All translations are our own.
Abstract
Does political violence leave a lasting legacy on identities, attitudes, and behaviors? We argue that violence shapes the identities of victims and that families transmit these effects across generations. Inherited identities then impact the contemporary attitudes and behaviors of the descendants of victims. Testing these hypotheses is fraught with methodological challenges; to overcome them, we study the deportation of Crimean Tatars in 1944 and the indiscriminate way deportees died from starvation and disease. We conducted a multigenerational survey of Crimean Tatars in 2014 and find that the descendants of individuals who suffered more intensely identify more strongly with their ethnic group, support more strongly the Crimean Tatar political leadership, hold more hostile attitudes toward Russia, and participate more in politics. But we find that victimization has no lasting effect on religious radicalization. We also provide evidence that identities are passed down from the victims of the deportation to their descendants.
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