Family Feud: How Cultural Similarity Causes Hostility and Wars

Does cultural proximity cause wars? This paper argues that it does. A dictator, in fear of losing his position, seeks to eliminate any culturally-similar democracy, or at least its influence. The dictator’s aim is to prevent social learning between the democracy and the dictator’s citizens. Thus, when considering culture and institutions together, the most warprone and the most hostile country pairs will be those which are culturally close (e.g. same religion, civilization), but institutionally apart (e.g. one democracy, one dictatorship), such as North and South Korea. Using the Correlates of War dataset of all the wars over the last two centuries, I find that the data agrees.