Renowned comparative political scientist and former CASBS fellow (1999-2000) David Laitin has influenced generations of scholars through his investigations of the intricate interplay of cultural phenomena – such as language, religion, and ethnicity – with politics and political life across societies. The complex dynamics he reveals get to the roots of conflict, cooperation, identity formation as well as nation- and state-building. Laitin takes us on a sweeping tour of some of his career’s principal works, findings, and collaborations in conversation with 2025-26 CASBS fellow Olukunle Owolabi.
Renowned comparative political scientist and former CASBS fellow (1999-2000) David Laitin has influenced generations of scholars through his investigations of the intricate interplay of cultural phenomena – such as language, religion, and ethnicity – with politics and political life across societies. The complex dynamics he reveals get to the roots of conflict, cooperation, identity formation as well as nation- and state-building. Laitin takes us on a sweeping tour of some of his career’s principal works, findings, and collaborations in conversation with 2025-26 CASBS fellow Olukunle Owolabi.
DAVID LAITIN: Stanford faculty page | Google Scholar page | National Academy of Sciences bio | Wikipedia page | Johan Skytte Foundation article |
OLUKUNLE OWOLABI: Villanova faculty page | CASBS bio | Villanova article on six awards won by Kunle's 2023 book |
David Laitin books:
D. Laitin. Politics, Language, and Thought: The Somali Experience (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977).
D. Laitin. Hegemony and Culture: The Politics of Religious Change among the Yoruba (Univ. Chicago Press, 1986).
D. Laitin and S. Samatar, Somalia: Nation in Search of a State (Westview Press, 1987).
D. Laitin. Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992).
D. Laitin. Identity in Formation: The Russian-speaking Populations in the Near Abroad (Cornell Univ. Press, 1998).
D. Laitin. Nations, States and Violence (Oxford Univ. Press, 2007).
D. Laitin, C. Adida and M. Valfort. Why Mulsim Integration Fails in Christian-heritage Societies (Harvard Univ. Press, 2016).
D. Laitin and D. Christensen. African Politics since Independence: Order, Development and Democracy (Yale Univ. Press, 2019).
David Laitin articles referenced in this episode:
D. Laitin and R. Ramachandran, "The Historical Sources of Language Policy," Journal of Politics (2014).
D. Laitin and R. Ramachandran, "Language Policy and Socioeconomic Outcomes," Palgrave Handbook of Economics and Language (2026).
D. Laitin and R. Ramachandran, "Linguistic Diversity, Official Language Choice and Human Capital," Journal of Development Economics (2022).
D. Laitin, R. Ramachandran and S. Walter," The Legacy of Colonial Language Policies and their Impact on Student Learning: Evidence from an Experimental Program in Cameroon," Economic Development and Cultural Change (2019).
D. Laitin and R. Ramachandran, "Language Policy and Human Development," American Political Science Review (2016).
D. Laitin, J. Hainmueller, et al., "Breaking Down Barriers to Naturalization for Low-income Immigrants: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Design," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2018).
D. Laitin, T. Gurr, et al., "Socially Relevant Ethnic Groups, Ethnic Structure and AMAR," Journal of Peace Research (2015).
D. Laitin and J. Fearon, "Civil War Non-onsets: The Case of Japan," Journal of Civilization Studies (2014)
D. Laitin, C. Adida and M. Valfort, "Identifying Barriers to Muslim Integration in France," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2010).
D. Laitin and J. Fearon, "Sons-of-the-soil, Migrants, and Civil War," World Development (2011).
D. Laitin and A. Krueger, "Kto-Kogo? A Cross-country Study of the Origins and Targets of Terrorism," in Terrorism, Economic Development, and Political Openness (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008).
D. Laitin and E. Berman, "Religion, Terrorism and Public Goods: Testing the Club Model," Journal of Public Economics (2008).
D. Laitin and A. Krueger, "'Misunderestimating' Terrorism: The State Department's Big Mistake, Foreign Affairs (2004).
D. Laitin and J. Fearon, "Neotrusteeship and the Problem of Weak States," International Security (2004).
D. Laitin and J. Fearon, "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War," American Political Science Review (2003).
D. Laitin and J. Fearon, "Violence and the Social Construction of Ethnic Identities," International Organization (2000).
D. Laitin and J. Fearon, "Explaining Interethnic Cooperation," American Political Science Review (1996).
D. Laitin, "The Tower of Babel as a Coordination Game: Political Linguistics in Ghana," American Political Science Review (1994).
D. Laitin, S. Kalyvas and C Sole, "Language and the Construction of States: The Case of Catalonia in Spain," Politics and Society (1994).
D. Laitin, "Linguistic Conflict in Catalonia," Language Problems and Language Planning (1987).
David Laitin's full curriculum vitae accessible from his Stanford University faculty page.
Postscript
In the episode, David Laitin acknowledges the influence of two towering social scientists -- Clifford Geertz and Albert Hirschman -- both of whom were CASBS fellows (Geertz in 1958-59, Hirschman in 1968-69). Hirschman, notably, wrote the seminal book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States while at CASBS. In this podcast episode, David Laitin describes developing the argument for his book Identity in Formation by following the conceptual framework of the classic Hirschman book.
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human-Centered. There are intricate pathways in which ethnicity, language, and religion may influence political behavior and outcomes. And how politics in turn can shape cultural strategies. These complex dynamics underlie conflict, cooperation, identity formation, and the foundational mechanisms of nation and state building. Within political science, few scholars have illuminated these complexities more prominently or consequently than David Laitin.
Today on Human-Centered, a conversation with David Laitin, the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He's an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 2021, he was the recipient of the Johan Skytte Prize, considered by many to be the Nobel Prize equivalent for political scientists. And notably for us, he was a CASBS fellow in 1999 to 2000. Throughout his celebrated 50-year career, Layton's investigations have taken him to Somalia, Nigeria, India, Spain, France, the post-Soviet states, and beyond. His fieldwork and scholarship have influenced generations of scholars.
One of those scholars is Layton's partner in today's conversation, Olukunle Owolabi. Kunle is an associate professor of political science at Villanova University. His 2023 book on the divergent legacies of colonial occupation in the Global South was the winner of numerous awards. And recently, he spent the 2025-26 academic year as a CASBS fellow. Kunle is well-versed in the David Laitin canon and takes us on a tour through some of Layton's principal works and findings. You'll hear exactly why Layton's books such as Hegemony and Culture, Linguistic Repertoires and State Construction in Africa, and Identity in Formation were timely when published and remain timeless today. In fact, Identity in Formation, published in 1998, predicted the conflict that eventually erupted in Ukraine in 2022.
The two explored Leighton's productive and impactful collaborations with James Fearon and Alan Krueger that took flight while the three were at CASBS, and as well as Leighton's more recent work with Stanford's Immigration Policy Lab. And in a first for our show, we closed the episode with a performance by a guest, a song of thanks by Kunle in a language and from a place that David knows very well. Let's listen.
Olukunle Owolabi: It's great to be here in studio today with Professor David Laitin from Stanford University and also a former CASBS fellow. And David is very well known among social scientists for his wide-ranging literature, which started off mostly focusing on questions of ethnicity and language and religion in sub-Saharan Africa. So in the '70s and '80s, David wrote 2 well-known books on politics in Somalia. But I wanted to start off the interview with some questions about your experience in Nigeria. And I'm starting there because we both have ties to Nigeria, which many listeners would recognize as being the most populous country in Africa.
David Laitin: Yes.
Olukunle Owolabi: West Africa. So some of you might be able to gather from my name that my family background on my dad's side is Nigerian, and actually lived there for 5 years as a kid in southwestern Nigeria. And I lived there shortly after David had done some pathbreaking research that went into his 1986 book, Hegemony and Culture. Politics and Religious Change Among the Yoruba. This was published by University of Chicago Press in 1986. So going back to reread sections of this book, it was really impressive to me in a really fun way, both how time-specific the research was, but also the timelessness of the project. So you kind of begin with this puzzle that in the late 1970s, Nigeria was going through a transition from military dictatorship to competitive elections. And there was a big constitutional debate about whether or not to establish a federal Sharia court. Not surprisingly, in a country that's roughly half Muslim and half Christian, this was a heavily politicized issue among many people. in the country, but not among the Yoruba, which is, I believe, the second largest ethnic group in Nigeria, primarily based in the southwest. And this is an ethnic community that's about half Christian and half Muslim. And surprisingly, all the debates around Sharia courts were not politicized in southwestern Nigeria along religious lines. And I want to talk to David and ask you a few questions about What got you interested in this question? How did you first become aware of some of the interesting intricacies between ethnicity, religion, region, and the ways in which these affect political behavior and outcomes in Nigeria?
David Laitin: It's a pleasure to be here and to be interviewed by you, Kunle, because your work on Africa and the Caribbean and the implications of different colonial experiences with long-lasting implications was a marvel for me. And it shows the next generation of Africanists will have you as a leader, and I'm really excited to see the leadership you will bring. To answer the question about Nigeria, I need to go back to Somalia. Please. And my doctoral dissertation and first book, based upon field research, but also a Peace Corps volunteer in Somalia, the country was going through a kind of linguistic war when it was independent, that everyone in the country spoke Somali, but the official languages were Arabic for religion, Italian in the south and English in the north based on colonial experience. And I asked the question, would it make a difference in terms of the way politics was argued and thought about if political debate were in Somali versus English? And what I did is a whole range of experiments of dialogues asking secondary students to talk about issues and argue about issues, and they were randomly assigned Somali Mali and English.
Olukunle Owolabi: Yeah, fascinating.
David Laitin: And what I found was there were some systematic differences in the way, for example, authority was expressed and exerted. And I linked this to the famous work of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz and thought of language as a cultural system, and the cultural systems have different implications in the way people acted. Everyone asked me afterwards, if language is a cultural system, what about another cultural system to see more generally? And religion was the obvious next step, but I could not do it in Somalia. Why?
Olukunle Owolabi: Because everyone's Muslim.
David Laitin: Everyone was Muslim. And if everyone is Muslim, you can't find variation. And I knew from my undergraduate and early graduate work in African studies, that there was a whole range of places across the West African Sahel where half the population was Christian and half the population was Muslim, and this had nothing to do with people choosing, but had to do with 19th century exposure. Basically, the Christians were coming north and the Muslims were coming south.
Olukunle Owolabi: Right.
David Laitin: And gosh, at certain places there were equal members. And I said, oh, Yorubaland, that is in southwestern Nigeria, was a perfect place to look. 50% Muslim and 50% Christian. Would there be a difference in the way they thought about authority, legitimacy, and politics?
Olukunle Owolabi: Awesome.
David Laitin: But as you indicated, One of the most exciting things I found when I started fieldwork is a different question, and that is that Christian Yorubas and Muslim Yorubas were not in conflict with each other and had nothing to do with political divides. All the political divides were in another identity, and that is what I called ancestral city.
Olukunle Owolabi: Correct.
David Laitin: And in these ancestral cities, there was great conflict between, for example, the Igbos, Ijebus, and Oyo, and Ifes.
Olukunle Owolabi: Mm-hmm.
David Laitin: And I tried to understand why you had conflict over ancestral city with comity in religion. And one of the exciting things, as you mentioned, was that in the great Nigerian debates about the Sharia, it was the Yorubas who were the actors who brought peace, who fought through a compromise that worked, and it kept the country for a long time religiously in comity. And I'll say one more thing about it bringing up to date. With Boko Haram almost destroying the comity in the country, Mm-hmm. where has there not been Christian-Muslim Anger and support for Boko Haram.
Olukunle Owolabi: In the southwest of Yorubaland.
David Laitin: In the southwest of Yorubaland. So this has lasted for a generation.
Olukunle Owolabi: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks so much for sharing those insights. As you were talking earlier, you mentioned Clifford Geertz, the well-known anthropologist whose work continues to shape the way in which culture is studied in a lot of different social science disciplines. And one of the things that's really striking to me when I read this book, it's very clearly influenced by anthropology and a little bit linguistics as well. I'm just really curious, did you ever— maybe you majored in one of those disciplines as an undergrad, I'm not sure— did you ever consider further study in either anthropology or linguistics? And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the ways in which those 2 disciplines in particular have shaped some of your early work?
David Laitin: Interesting that where I was an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, there was no anthropology department.
Olukunle Owolabi: Oh, wow, okay.
David Laitin: And I came to UC Berkeley interested in Africa because of my experience as a high school student in Brooklyn, New York. In the early 1960s, the UN was being transformed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. With new countries and new representatives, and I thought Africa was the future, and I wanted to, to learn about it. I was also just always interested in politics, whether it be local politics in New York City or national politics, and John Kennedy was like my my ideal, my ideal, because not only was he the first president born in the 20th century, a young, young man, but also his first speech as a senator represented support of the independence movement in Algeria against France.
Olukunle Owolabi: Wow.
David Laitin: And this looked like the future to me. When I went to graduate school at Berkeley, the question that most Africanists who were political scientists were asking was, were African countries going to be pro-Soviet or pro-US? Were they gonna be capitalists or were they gonna be socialists?
Olukunle Owolabi: Right.
David Laitin: And I thought, I can't imagine, although I had never been to Africa, I can't imagine people in the, in the countryside caring about whether they were Soviets or pro-American.
Olukunle Owolabi: Right.
David Laitin: And I said to myself, gosh, what would they be political about? And one of the exciting things, because I had been reading the literature on Negritude and African personality coming actually from the Caribbean, I said to myself, every independence leader was pushing for African personality, yet every single African country had as an official language the European colonial language. And I said, this is an issue that people would care about. They were sending their kids to school in a language that they themselves didn't understand, and their grandparents couldn't understand what their kids were talking about.
Olukunle Owolabi: Yeah, in my primary school, it was actually forbidden to speak Yoruba. We had to speak English all the time. This was 1983 to '87, so 20 years after independence.
David Laitin: And I said, this is an issue that would be important, and for that, I needed to read a good deal of anthropology, and Clifford Geertz became relevant here as thinking about cultural systems. So it was my intuition That language was going to be an important political issue that drew me to reading anthropology. Yeah. Oh, wow.
Olukunle Owolabi: That's such a cool kind of introduction into, yeah, the connection between anthropology as a discipline and the way in which it's informed some of your work in political science. Just going back, Briefly to that language question as a legacy of colonialism for some of our listeners who might be curious about this. It's really striking to me talking to you today that in some ways, Nigeria and Somalia are opposite extremes of the same problem, in the sense that Somalia is this country that everyone speaks the same African language, Somali, and there's a very strong sense of Somali nationality. And yet it's had all these political problems because of its colonization that left behind multiple European and/or foreign languages— Arabic for religion, obviously, right? Italian, which you mentioned. English, which you mentioned. But even French in what is now Djibouti, right? Nigeria has the complete opposite problem, 300+ African languages of which, you know, many people are very conversant in 3, 4, sometimes African languages, plus English, the official language, because of colonization. And many Muslims are literate in Arabic. And so Nigeria's problems stem from the, I guess, the Tower of Babel issue, right? This question of like, how do you make a country work when you have hundreds and hundreds of different languages that are spoken and used in different ways on a daily basis? And I want to pick your brain a bit about those 2 problems as far as they relate to some of your current and much more recent work. So in the last few years, you've been working on some really fascinating research with Rajesh Ramachandran, who is— he's an economist, is that correct, by training?
David Laitin: Correct.
Olukunle Owolabi: Yeah. And he works at Monash University in Malaysia. And I was very curious because there are some very clear and strong and obvious ties between your older work and this current stuff that you're working on and have published with Rajesh Ramachandran. And there are obviously some very, very clear and important differences, particularly as far as method, and data analysis and the more intense use of kind of econometric methods to try to understand some of these questions. But I did want to pick your brain a little bit. What started the research collaboration with Rajesh? And then what have you learned from some of your most— your more recent research with Rajesh? That builds on the earlier work that you did looking at the politics and political relevance of language as it relates to state-building, nation-building, human development, conflict.
David Laitin: In the late 1980s, I had a chance to travel and— to the Indian Institute of Languages in Karnataka State. And I wanted to ask the question how the normal post-colonial state, which is more like Nigeria and less like Somalia, of scores of different languages, and how they were going to develop a national consciousness and have a national identity.
Olukunle Owolabi: Yeah.
David Laitin: And what I learned from 6 or 8 weeks in India, even though I spoke no Indian language, in languages was that there was a— what I called a language equilibrium, which I called 3 plus or minus 1 languages in ambitious people's and young people's linguistic repertoires. They spoke the language, their maternal language, mother tongue. They had to speak an international language if they were going to have any chance of success as a middle-class person in life, and that was English. But there was a national language being, which was a lingua franca that was throughout the country, which was Hindi. That's 3 different languages in the standard repertoire. Mother tongue, lingua franca, and international language. But if you were a minority in a state with 3 languages, say a Marathi speaker in Karnataka, You would have rights to have language taught to you in your mother tongue, which would be 3 plus 1 languages. But if you were in a state like Bihar, where the state language was Hindi, you only needed the 2 languages, the international language and Hindi. That's 3 minus 1. And there was an equilibrium of 3 plus or minus 1 languages. That actually sounds a lot It sounds a ton like Nigeria. And I wrote a book about— I wrote a book called Linguistic Repertoires and State Construction in Africa. And there I showed this 3 plus or minus 1 was a general phenomenon. And later on I said, this is very similar to the linguistic equilibrium in an emerging European state. Right. Anyway, I saw this new kind of national consciousness, which was not one language, one nation, but many different languages in an equilibrium for each state, but a different equilibrium for each state depending on their linguistic situation. In Northern Europe, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, this 2 plus or minus 1 language situation they have involves K through 12 in indigenous language, in mother tongue, and a good grounding in English.
Olukunle Owolabi: Right, yeah.
David Laitin: As a second language throughout K through 12. And I said, This is likely to be a good equilibrium for African countries where K through 12 is indigenous, but everyone learns English.
Olukunle Owolabi: Or French or whatever the international language is.
David Laitin: International language as part of their subject matter so that when they reach university and university work, they will be capable of medium of instruction Through the international language. Rajesh, coming back to Rajesh Ramachandran. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He came to me in a conference I was at in Barcelona. He was a graduate student, and he asked me for 15 minutes of my time over coffee. And I said I'd be happy to, even though I was a full, famous full professor and he was a graduate student. This is where I always learn. And he said, I can show you that the reliance on indigenous language in K through 6, he said, brings long-term benefits, not only in mathematics, but in English.
Olukunle Owolabi: Sure, yeah.
David Laitin: And I said, I've been wanting to say that for a long time, but I didn't have the methods to show it. And he showed me some, regression analyses that I didn't believe at all. And I brought it to my best students in Stanford and said, tear this apart, this can't be true. And indeed, it held up to all kinds of scrutiny that early education in, whether it be Yoruba or other indigenous languages, paid off in what we called human development.
Olukunle Owolabi: Yes.
David Laitin: That is, ability to read and to analyze mathematically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we then used the mathematical or econometric models in a variety of different ways, and we now have 4 or 5 papers where we show that this equilibrium with medium of instruction in mother tongue in the first 6 years pays off in human development.
Olukunle Owolabi: Yeah, that's so interesting that you bring this up, both in terms of Rajesh's contributions to your research, but also the methodological sophistication of it. And it's interesting because going back decades, there've been kind of rigorous debates in different African countries about the pros and cons of what I'm going to call the British model versus the French model of education vis-à-vis language. So in most former British colonies in Africa, a lot of schools, you'd start in some African vernacular language, usually the dominant language, the dominant local language, and you'd begin learning English as a subject. This would have been how my dad would have attended primary school back in the 1950s, right? This is pre-independence. And then as you kind of go up the scholarly ladder, the proportion of English is slowly increased so that by the time you get to about 7th grade, pretty much all of your schooling is in English. And And you would continue to learn as a subject, whatever the dominant African language was. And in French colonies and Portuguese colonies in Africa, from day one, kids were learning in school French or Portuguese, which they would not speak at home and often had very little sort of contact or connection to their day-to-day Lives. And people found just from looking at raw data that the proportion of kids that would pass primary school and be able to move on to secondary school was much higher in the Anglophone context than in the Francophone context. And what's fascinating to me, and I'm sure you've seen some of these studies, is that— is how long those colonial legacies persisted after independence, literally, in many cases, 30 years or more of continuing the same colonial model, which brings me to my next set of questions that I wanted to ask you. We're going to move a little bit outside of Africa for a while and begin to talk and think about what happens when empires break down and what happens to people living in those Kind of successor or postcolonial cases. So some listeners may be familiar with your amazing work on the post-Soviet republics, which, you know, related to your work in Africa, is both extremely timely and timeless. Right. So I'm referring to your book, Identity and Formation, which I have to confess was one of my favorite books that was on my comprehensive exam list. And I was completely blown away by the genius behind this project. But so what this book does is it's a kind of a longitudinal study of the political aspirations and attitudes and affiliations of ethnic Russians who were, quote unquote, left behind in the successor states that seceded from what used to be the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, right? So many of the former Soviet republics, right, we're talking places like Ukraine and the Baltic countries and the Central Asian republics, which are still regularly in the news about things that relate to exactly this issue, have sizable Russian-speaking or ethnic minorities of Russians that sort of vary from about 10% of the population to about a quarter or a third. And so as some of these different countries gain independence, it becomes a real Question. How do the ethnic Russians who are still living in these new countries relate to the countries and the governments and the societies of the successor countries that they now live in? And to what extent do they maintain their ties, either political or cultural, to things Russian while now living outside of Russia. And from what I remember of the book, it points out amazing and fascinating variation across, broadly speaking, 3 types of post-Soviet states, right? So there's the Baltic model on the one hand, where you have countries like Lithuania and Estonia and Latvia. On the other extreme, you kind of have the Central Asian model. And I think the country that's most highlighted in your book is Kazakhstan, right? You have this large country in Central Asia that is mostly Muslim and culturally very different from Russia in every way. And then somewhere in between those 2 models, you have Ukraine, which is, of course, in the news now all the time because of the war going that's been raging there since 2022. But the current conflict in Ukraine, the roots of it obviously stem from very complex interactions between Russians and Ukrainians that date back centuries. So I would love to talk to you about what got you interested in the post-Soviet region. Number one. Number two, when did you start the research for the book? Because, I mean, it reads as if it started in the late Soviet period. I'm not sure that's actually true, but I'd love to hear about actually starting research in what used to be the USSR and finishing it where you have 15 different independent countries? And then lastly, what surprised you the most from the research, from what you learned doing the research? And if you can speak a bit about the implications for what you found back in the '90s for some of the current geopolitical struggles and conflicts that— and rifts that continue to shape, characterize, and in some ways destabilize that part of the world.
David Laitin: Wow. Thank you for the comments on identity and formation. We've already discussed my interest in language and language choice and language movements. Of the attempt to bring about linguistic or language policies in favor of your own group's language or in the search for separation from the state based upon linguistic differences. So, these language movements throughout the world, whether it be in Canada, Belgium, or in Nigeria were always on my mind. In the late 1980s, because of events in the Soviet Union, the 14 non-Russian republics began passing legislation, which I like to say as denying the Russian speakers in their country their historic rights to be monolingual. They had to learn the republican language, which meant Kazakh in Kazakhstan or Estonian in Estonia. And I was fascinated by this new legislation coming from almost all of the former Union republics. Even though then I was working on a major project in Spain, in Catalonia, on the Catalan national movement to basically get autonomy within Spain with the 4 provinces that consider themselves Països Catalanes, Catalan countries, I dropped the Catalan project, although I had a few papers from that project, and said, I can't be a student of language movements unless I study what's happening in the Soviet Union.
Olukunle Owolabi: Oh, wow.
David Laitin: I dropped everything and started enrolling in— at University of Chicago, enrolling in Russian language courses so I would get some degree of facility in Russian, which expanded over the next several years. So I went into the Soviet project, or post-Soviet project, with a feeling of, if I don't know this case, I can't call myself a student of language politics. What I found was, and you already indicated some, is there was not a unified response to the collapse of the Soviet Union. from the point of view of the Russian speakers. And I went back to the work, the famous work, of Albert Hirschman.
Olukunle Owolabi: Mm-hmm.
David Laitin: And Albert Hirschman had taught us, in a declining market, there were 3 ways companies can react. One, they can exit the market. 2, they can become loyal to the changes. And 3, they can demand voice for changes in the local market. Exit, voice, and loyalty.
Olukunle Owolabi: Mm-hm.
David Laitin: And I said to myself, this is what you see in 3 different, because of historic differences, in 3 different sets of union republics in the Soviet Union. One was where The Russian speakers did— thought that the native population was lower status than they. And the language was of lower status. And I developed mechanisms to study the status of languages. Under these conditions, the Russians would never learn Kazakh. And their only choice was, once they had the opportunity They would exit and return to homeland Russia, even though they'd never lived in Russia, even though their parents never lived in Russia, and even though they ate rice rather than potatoes, they still considered themselves Russians.
Olukunle Owolabi: Yeah.
David Laitin: And so their expected choice would be exit. In Estonia, however, they considered Estonia to be a high European culture. And the Estonian language, even though none of them spoke it, the Russians, was something that if they had to learn it, if they had to learn it in order to succeed in high-status Estonia, they would. And there you would get loyalty.
Olukunle Owolabi: Yeah.
David Laitin: And indeed, in Estonia, the Russians began to go into Estonian language classes. They couldn't get citizenship later on until they spoke Estonian, but did not go to war or did not fight seeking independence for it. They basically developed facility in Estonian. The 3rd model was Ukraine, as you mentioned. In Ukraine, the languages are so close, the Russians considered Ukrainian to be a dialect of Russian.
Olukunle Owolabi: Yeah, like a folk tongue.
David Laitin: Like a folk dialect. Like a folk dialect, and that it would be silly, as one parent said to me in my field research, they're making my kids study Pushkin, the great Russian author, in Ukrainian. This is an outrage. Everyone can read it in Russian. And they were outraged by being pushed to learn what they considered a peripheral dialect as the official language of state. And they developed, to make a long story short, a party of regions where they sought to have what I called a Belgian solution. That is, the east would be Russian-speaking, the west would be Ukrainian-speaking, and Kyiv like Brussels in the center, would be bilingual. And they pushed for this more or less Belgian solution, but the radical Ukrainianists of the West said, no way, we're gonna have a nation that's monolingual administratively in Ukrainian.
Olukunle Owolabi: Mm-hmm.
David Laitin: And this I saw as a voice by the Russians to seek, in a sense, policy changes by the Ukrainians who were running the country, to seek autonomy in the eastern regions and southern regions. And this, I saw, was a possibility for high-level conflict. And unfortunately, I was right.
Olukunle Owolabi: Yeah, another very amazing example of how Your decades-old research still reads as if it speaks to many of today's problems, which is great. And for readers out there who are curious and have time, I would highly, highly, highly recommend reading Identity Information.
David Laitin: Interestingly enough, Identity Information has more sales since the beginning of the war Oh, really? Than it did for the first 10 years after publication.
Olukunle Owolabi: Yeah, yeah, I can't say I'm shocked. I believe the year after Identity and Formation came out, which was 1998, you began your fellowship year here at CASBS, which you held in 1999 to 2000. And I made some inferences by Looking at your CV and studying the arc of your work about the ways in which the CASBS fellowship may have been massively influential in the kind of direction of your work for the next decade or so. I'd like to hear whether my inferences are correct or not, these assumptions that I sort of put together, because I noticed a couple of things. The CASBS fellowship year, number one, coincided more or less with your move from University of Chicago to Stanford. That's the first thing that I noticed. The second thing I noticed was that the CASBS fellowship year was the beginning of what I think are your first quantitative publications on ethnic conflict, publications that use large N cross-national data analysis to model and theorize about the origins of ethnic conflict in different parts of the world. And the third thing that I noticed was that your CASBS fellowship year seemed— seems like it was the beginning of a decade long or so, maybe longer, research collaboration with Jim Fearon, who is a political science professor, faculty member at Stanford. And you guys were also fellows at CASBS in the same year. So I guess I'd like to hear from you. Are my assumptions and inferences How correct are they, number one? And number two, what do you see as the ways in which the trajectory of your career and research were most profoundly impacted by your CASBS fellowship year?
David Laitin: Jim Fearon was hired as an assistant professor at University of Chicago. in international relations, and I was then a full professor.
Olukunle Owolabi: Yeah.
David Laitin: And we both had common interests. We were both Berkeley PhDs.
Olukunle Owolabi: Yeah.
David Laitin: And we had common interests in our puppies and our— and other ties. And he, one lunch or one day, asked me, he said, He said, you're a student of comparative politics, why do ethnic groups kill each other and fight with each other? He saw himself as thinking of countries fighting each other.
Olukunle Owolabi: Correct.
David Laitin: As an IR specialist, and wanted to know whether I could help him understand that. And my response was, I've never looked at violence or ethnic and I don't know what the possible answer is. So I had a little cottage on the St. Joe River that we spent weekends, and he and his wife would join us, and we would take long kayak rides talking about ethnic conflict that we began to read about collectively.
Olukunle Owolabi: Yeah.
David Laitin: And one of these kayak rides, I told him a story of my youth. I went to a public school in Brooklyn, K through 6, in which, even though it was a multiethnic area of Catholics and Jews, all the Catholics went to what we called parochial schools, and the Jews all went to the public schools. schools. And one day, I'm walking home from school, and a bunch of the Catholic kids basically intimidate us and tried to beat us up until I ran home.
Olukunle Owolabi: Yeah.
David Laitin: So, what did I do? I told my mom. My mom told the principal of the public school. The principal of the school went to the whatever they called him, the deacon of the Catholic school, and said— told them about this. And the deacon, whatever he's called, said to the principal, it won't happen again. I'll find out who did it. It never happened again. Jim listened to this. Jim Fearon listened to this story and said, this is fascinating. And it led to a notion of policing, that we couldn't have policed the Catholic schools because we didn't know who the heck they were.
Olukunle Owolabi: Right.
David Laitin: The only way to do it is if the elites of one side, both interested in peace, would police their own group against the attacks on the other. That led to an article in the American Political Science Review that won us all sorts explaining ethnic cooperation. And what we found was the degree to which ethnic groups were in violent conflict with each other was almost zero. It was only, but the journalists would only go to the places where there was ethnic war.
Olukunle Owolabi: Right.
David Laitin: This was a massive error in what we call selection bias. And it started off on a long-term collaboration between us.
Olukunle Owolabi: Okay.
David Laitin: And we put together, worked with a dataset of Professor Ted Geur, who had all the ethnic groups in the world and wanted to know the degree to which they would be at war with each other. Jim and I worked with this data for a long time and realized we'd never get over a problem of selection bias. That is, of putting ethnic groups in the dataset based upon the degree to which they had some influence over peace or war.
Olukunle Owolabi: Mm-hm.
David Laitin: And when we came to CASBS together, we finally decided that we could not use ethnic group as the unit of observation. state year, that is Iraq 1974, Iraq 1975, Iraq 1976, which brought us about 8,000 observations. And the dependent variable would be, is there a civil war onset in that country in that year? And that setup is what we worked on for the year here at Stanford. And put together our most cited paper on the sources of civil war violence. So this gave us, that is this being CASBS, gave us the opportunity to revise completely the dataset that would overcome the selection bias issue and led to that paper, at CASBS that year was Alan Krueger, a famous economist and future head of the Council of Economic Advisers.
Olukunle Owolabi: Mm-hm.
David Laitin: And Alan and I began to work on and counting incidences, not of ethnic war, but of ethnic activists engaged in activities of terrorism to fulfill their goals. And it led to, for me, a series of papers on terrorism with Alan and also with Eli Berman at UC San Diego. And Alan and I became part of a blue ribbon commission of the CIA of open data sources, of how to collect data on terrorism, which is still being used at University of Maryland. So this was my first move into doing some degree of non-paid consultation with the US government.
Olukunle Owolabi: As you look ahead to retirement, I know that many academics continue to write, after they're formally retired. And I was wondering if there are ongoing research questions and projects that you're working on, or any new questions that you'd like to devote your time to unpacking.
David Laitin: We haven't mentioned the work I did in France. And there I asked the question, whether Muslims who immigrated into Europe faced higher burdens to integration than they would if they were Christians. And I used a strategy similar to the one of Yorubaland and hegemony and culture and found a group from Senegal that was half Muslim and half Christian.
Olukunle Owolabi: Mm-hm.
David Laitin: that came to France to work in the 1970s, and they all came for the same reason, drought in Senegal. And I asked whether higher burdens, higher barriers to success for the children of the Muslim migrants compared to the Christian. And indeed, Indeed there were, and we ran a range, I and one of my graduate students and someone else from Sciences Po ran experiments to see how Français de souche, rooted French, interacted with Muslims versus Christians.
Olukunle Owolabi: Yeah.
David Laitin: And found what we saw a kind of, we called, a discriminatory equilibrium. That led to a situation about a decade ago when we brought in a new professor into our department, Jens Heidmüller, who was studying issues of integration into Europe by minorities. And the two of us put together an immigration policy lab.
Olukunle Owolabi: Mm-hm.
David Laitin: which has been operating now for about a decade.
Olukunle Owolabi: Oh, wow.
David Laitin: And in this international, in this sort of integration policy lab, we look at American or European policies towards migrants and ask the degree to which we can make their integration success more likely.
Olukunle Owolabi: Mm-hm.
David Laitin: And the biggest project, not mine, within this lab has been what we call GeoMatch. That is, trying to figure out where geographically a placement of a particular immigrant, say, by religion, by country, by language, by education, where they would most likely succeed.
Olukunle Owolabi: Mm-hm.
David Laitin: And based upon data of 90 days after placement, GeoMatch had a predicted value of 40% more success in first job placement.
Olukunle Owolabi: Mm-hm.
David Laitin: We then won a big award from the National Institute of Health to look at policies towards immigrants in the United States, and a particular set of immigrants. And that is kids who were the US citizen children of undocumented moms.
Olukunle Owolabi: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
David Laitin: And my work in the past 2 or 3 years has focused on this group, about 5 million of them, on the degree of access to what America has to offer. One of the biggest findings we've had is those kids whose mothers were eligible for DACA were far less likely to be diagnosed as young kids with anxiety-related disorders. DACA had a big effect on the health of US citizen kids of undocumented moms.
Olukunle Owolabi: That is shocking.
David Laitin: And to answer the question, that you asked, my research in the next couple of years has been looking at the health implications of policies towards immigrants and children of immigrants for success in health.
Olukunle Owolabi: Fascinating. I look forward to reading some of this work as it comes out. So, I hope you will keep me posted. I wanted to ask you to comment a little bit about your role in mentoring and supporting and encouraging PhD students and early career scholars.
David Laitin: In a celebration of my future retirement, my graduate students put together a dataset of the 50 PhD students that I mentored here at Stanford and Chicago, which was about 3 times higher than any colleague in my department.
Olukunle Owolabi: No.
David Laitin: This was both love and self-interest because I learned so much from the graduate students. My style as a mentor was not to sit down and to say test my own theories or push my own theories, but to ask them why is it they became political scientists. What did they wanna answer? We give you the tools here at Stanford to do the most sophisticated research, but don't use those tools like nuclear weapons trying to kill a fly. But use those tools to answer a question you think is important. And my job is, has been, I often make the analogy to Catcher in the Rye, just watching them from the periphery of their work, and when they start falling off by trying to do something, going in a wrong direction, or answering questions which aren't important, For their own research, I would push them back and remind them what their own research was about. And working with them to fulfill their own intellectual agenda has been a crucial goal of mine. And I have in my office some 15 or 20 university press books which followed from the work that they did under my mentorship. And it's one of the real exciting joys of my career that I've had this relationship. And today, many of these students are senior professors in top universities. And this data set I mentioned a moment ago pointed to the fact that I have scores of call them students of my students who are now professors. And we have a small set of grand students who were the students of the students of the students following this. And this has been one of the great joys of my career.
Olukunle Owolabi: That's an amazing and very inspiring story to hear. So thank you for sharing that with me. And I thought I would end our conversation with a Yoruba song of thanksgiving that I learned as a kid when I lived in Nigeria. And you might recognize this from the dedication to your book, Hegemony and Culture. [singing] And the translation is, my thanks are not enough, every day I give thanks, my thanks are not enough, every day I rejoice. So thank you to Professor David Laitin for your contributions, your scholarship, this hour of your time. And thank you to those in the audience for listening to us chat. I hope everyone has a wonderful day ahead, and thanks for listening.
Narrator: That was David Layden in conversation with Kunle Owolabi. As always, you can follow us online or in your podcast app of choice. And if you're interested in learning more about the Center's people, projects, and rich history, you can visit our website at casbs.stanford.edu. Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human-Centered team, thanks for listening.