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Studies have found that politically deprived groups are more likely to rebel. However, does rebellion increase the likelihood of achieving political rights? This article proposes that rebellion helps ethnic groups to overcome deprivation. I illustrate this by using a “typical” case (the Ijaw’s struggle against the Nigerian government) to demonstrate how ethnic rebellion increases the costs for the government to a point where granting political rights becomes preferable to war. Further, I exploit time-series-cross-sectional data on deprived ethnic groups to show that rebellion is significantly associated with overcoming deprivation. The statistical analysis shows that democratic change is an alternative mechanism.

Despite the importance attributed to the e§ects of diversity on the stability and prosperity of nations, the origins of the uneven distribution of ethnic and cultural fragmentation across countries have been underexplored. Building on the role of deeply-rooted biogeographical forces in comparative development, this research empirically demonstrates that genetic diversity, predominantly determined during the prehistoric ìout of Africaî migration of humans, is an underlying cause of various existing manifestations of ethnolinguistic heterogeneity. Further exploration of this uncharted territory may revolutionize the understanding of the e§ects of deeply-rooted factors on economic development and the composition of human capital across the globe. (JEL N30, O10, O50, Z10)

The Jews of Romania were a particular ethnic group which, during history, had to bear a lot of discriminations. In modern epoch they could attend schools only by paying substantial fees, very few of them had the Romanian citizenship until 1918 and they could not be active in all professions. The interwar period meant for the Jews the time when they had the most rights in Romania, while, during the war, the anti-Jewish laws, forced labour, deportations in Transnistria were established, and the Jews from North-West Transylvania were sent by Hungarian authorities in German concentration camps. Romanians often displayed feelings of hostility towards the Jews, mostly in periods when the situation of their country was precarious. This paper will also present a few negative features used by Romanians in order to define the Jews. Last, but not least, the author wanted to show how the Holocaust was regarded by historians and politicians. And here, I noticed that in communist times, when the political elites had the intention to assimilate the Jews, it was considered that during the Holocaust several democratic groups were persecuted or, later, the responsability for Holocaust was put only on Germans. During post-1989 period, integral or partial negation of Holocaust, or its trivialization by comparison, continued to exist.