Center for Effective Global Action

Genocides rank among the darkest episodes in our history. What drives prejudice against targeted outgroups in the lead-up to mass killings? We theorize the role played by democratization, ethnoreligious threat perceptions, and economic discontent in generating antiminority hatred. We assess these factors’ predictive strength using a new 22,000-person survey of Islamophobia in Myanmar, fielded shortly before the 2017 ethnic cleansing of the country’s Muslim Rohingya population. Integrating survey responses with administrative data, events data, and geodata, we document a robust association between poverty and anti-Muslim attitudes among members of Myanmar’s Buddhist majority. The relationship holds ecologically and by individual. Further tests point to scapegoating rather than resource competition as the most likely mechanism. Other commonly cited drivers of intolerance receive little empirical support. By leveraging a critical contemporary case, our paper sheds light on the material foundations of polarized social preferences in settings at high risk of intergroup violence