Current Events > New study correlates cultural diversity with a clear increase in violence

(+) Yeah! (+)

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-42919593

NOTE: Correlates, not necessarily causes. Still, the results are pretty compelling.

They are the places you have to go through in order to get from one town to another and where there are few other routes - hence the correlation with the Silk Road.

What he found was that these correlated strongly with data on violence - including terrorism, war between states and gang violence. Crossroad towns and cities, it suggested, were inherently unstable.

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Dr Guo's model is controversial. It puts significantly more emphasis on the physical geography of areas rather than other social, cultural or religious factors which might more traditionally be explored as a way of trying to understand conflict.

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The hypothesis he is pursuing is that certain areas have more contentious ideas flowing through them than other areas, and that somehow destabilises them.

Dr Guo is careful not to say that cultural diversity is an inevitable instability factor for societies, but areas with a lot of movement - whether in culture, trade, ideas or people - do appear to correlate with risk.

"On average, across the world [in 2017], 76% of all terrorist attacks happened within the actual cities where we predicted [in 2016] that they would happen - and around 90% within 50km of the cities. That's the level of predictive accuracy," he says.

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This just in: cultures clash.

When you have very different people in close quarters, belief systems and values will clash. Often times violently.

That is why it's stupid to define "diversity" as something like "how many different cultures we can cram into a single place without any specific culture being overly represented." Diversity works best when you can go to China Town and then a Ukrainian village all within the same day a la Chicago. When you see something wrong with there being a China Town or a Ukrainian village within a city, though, is when you get into issues where you don't have diversity as much as you have a loss of culture.
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