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Database Spotlight: Minorities at Risk Organizational

Behavior (MAROB)
September 26, 2012

Sacha Ginsberg

Researchers from START and the Center for International Development and Conflict Management
(CIDCM) have released a dataset that can help scholars and practitioners better understand how and why
some ethnopolitical organizations (organizations rooted in ethnic groups) use violence and terrorism in
response to their grievances with local, national or international authority structures.
START researchers, Victor Asal, Jonathan Wilkenfeld and Amy Pate compiled research on 118
organizations representing the interests of 22 ethnopolitical groups in 16 countries of the Middle East and
North Africa, operating between January of 1980 and December, 2004 to form the Minorities at Risk
Organizational Behavior (MAROB) Database.
The database is part of the larger Minorities at Risk(MAR) Project that analyzes conflicts of politically
charged communal groups based in all countries with a minimum population of 500,000 people. The
project holds data on 283 active ethnopolitical groups, and tracks them on political, economic and cultural
dimensions.
The fundamental question pertaining to the MAROB database is what motivates the strategies and tactics
of politically mobilized and ethnically based organizations. MAROB's criteria for organization selection into
the dataset includes characteristics such as:
The organization makes explicit claims to represent the interests of one or more ethnic groups and/or
the organization's members are primarily members of a specific ethnic minority.
The organization is political in its goals and activities.
The organization is active at a regional and/or national level.
The organization was not created by a government.
The organization is active for at least three consecutive years between 1980 and 2004.
Umbrella organizations (coalitions/alliances) are NOT coded. Instead, member organizations are
coded.
Analysis of this data reveals major changes over the past three decades in the behavior and ideologies of
these organizations. The proportion of organizations that used violence as a means of protest declined.
While the number or organizations increased from 39 in 1980 to 96 in 2004, the percentage of
organizations that used violence decreased from 56 percent in 1986 to only 14 percent in 2004. According
to Pate, while all the organizations in the database have an ethnic identity, the mix of other ideologies
espoused have also changed over time.
The percentage of organizations advocating for democracy has steadily increased since 1990 and the
number of religiously oriented organizations has increased dramatically since the late 1990s. MAROB
researchers are currently processing data for the ethnopolitical groups in Latin America and Posthttp://www.start.umd.edu/news/database-spotlight-minorities-risk-organizational-behavior-marob

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Communist Europe, as well as extending the data for the Middle East and North Africa.
The MAROB database can be found here and its codebook here.
For further analysis, there is also a report on The Use of Violence by Ethnopolitical Organizations in the
Middle East.

KEYWORDS
Projects:
Minorities at Risk Related Projects
Investigators:
Amy Pate
Jonathan Wilkenfeld
Victor Asal
Topics:
Ethnic Conflict and Violence

Group Behavior

Political conflict and Violence

Terrorism Databases and Resources

Research Area:
Terrorism and Society
Regions:
Global

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