Self-Fulfilling Grievances: Flemish War Casualties and the Front Movement during the First World War

Thomas Gepts, University of California, Berkeley
Robert Braun, University of California, Berkeley

We study how ethnic movements in hierarchical settings can transform perceived but non-existing social problems into real social problems through the activation of ethnic fault lines. We zero-in on grievances in the context of the Front movement, an organization of Flemish soldiers in the trenches of WW1 which protested the increased risk of dying because of ethnic discrimination by their Walloon officers. A combination of difference-in-difference analysis and Piecewise exponential models reveals that Flemish soldiers were more likely to perish after (and not before) the Front movement started mobilizing and that this change was more pronounced in units that experienced Front movement mobilization. Additional tests suggest that these patterns emerged because of negative responses to protests by Walloon peers and superiors. Taken together our findings demonstrate the importance of self-fulfilling grievances, an understudied process through which movements socially construct reality with potentially unintended consequences.

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 Presented in Session 167. Protests, Movements, Rebellions