English to Portuguese Social Sciences History e antropologia

Explaining the incentives to violence: a tipping game phenomenon The tipping game, first developed by Schelling (1978) to explain phenomena such as neighborhood stability, can be applied to the dynamics of recruitment to national causes. To illustrate the tipping mechanism, I shall first present a model showing the difficulties nation­alist leaders face in seeking support for a switch of the language of public education from that of the center to that of the region (Laitin 1989). This model can be expanded so as to specify the point in the national project when leaders would have an incentive to use violent tactics.

Consider a region in a country in which over the centuries a signifi­cant percentage of people have begun to use the language of the political center as the language of education, work, and even everyday life at home. Many in the small towns and rural areas are bilingual but only a few are mono lingual in the language of the region, a language which no longer has the institutional support (in schools, 01' in administration) to survive in the long term There will inevitably be a corps of national historians, poets and philologists who keep the national language "alive"; they will have the seeds for any counter-hegemonic nationalist movement if and when leading sectors of the regional society cultivate such a movement.

The national revival will require, inter alia, that people who rely principally on the state language for getting information, watching television, and writing letters begin to equip themselves (and more importantly, their children) to operate in the regional language. This will be a costly investment especially if, for lack of a critical mass of speakers of the regional language, the movement fails. Each person in the region needs to calculate the costs and benefits of re-aligning him- or herself with the regional language, based on subjective assessments of the probability of others making a similar choice.