Take the repression of political rights. Political scientists have measured this sort of behavior, scoring it year by year, government by government. There is basically no relationship between political repression and the risk of civil war. Take economic or political discrimination against an ethnic minority. Two political scientists at Stanford, Jim Fearon and David Laitin, have measured this for more than two hundred ethnic minorities around the world. They found no relationship between whether a group was politically repressed and the risk of civil war. Ethnic minorities are just as likely
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