Social Cohesion and Violence: Explaining Riots in East Jerusalem Neighborhoods

Why do some neighborhoods in divided cities exhibit more violence than others? The ethnic violence literature in general and studies of violence in ethnically divided cities in particular explain cycles of urban violence as one possible outcome of individual and group behavior motivated by the desire to address group grievances (economic, political, cultural etc). Neighborhood violence, or lack thereof, it follows, is a function of the spatial dispersion of groups and the intensity of their grievances. The empirical record suggests that this is not always the case. Violence sometimes breaks out with no apparent reason in communities that seem to be quite well off, while neighborhoods hosting politically excluded and economically discriminated groups may be surprisingly at peace. In this paper we argue that neighborhood social cohesion (i.e. leadership, norms and organizations) explains variation in the proclivity to experience violence. More so, we argue, that social cohesion moderates the effect on violence of economic and political motivations. To test this proposition, we analyze three geo-located datasets recording violence in Jerusalem between the years 2013-2015. Our results reveal that even when controlling for economic and political determinants of violence, as well as for spatial clustering and temporal explanations, neighborhood level social cohesion is a robust explanatory variable of riots, and its' interaction with economic conditions moderates neighborhood’s proclivity to riot.