Redemption through Rebellion: Border Change, Lost Unity, and Nationalist Conflict

Abstract

Are past border changes responsible for today's civil wars? Departing from conventional, state‐centric research designs, this article examines this question by focusing on “aggregate” ethnic groups, which are defined independently of state borders. Introducing a new index of “territorial fractionalization” that measures how fragmented such groups are across states, we postulate that higher fragmentation is linked to a greater risk of civil conflict. Furthermore, we expect that groups that experienced increases in fragmentation are particularly violence prone, as illustrated by postimperial revisionism and other cases of irredentism and secession. To test our arguments, we combine geocoded data on ethnic settlement areas with our own newly collected data on international borders since 1886, complemented by mediation analysis based on ethnonationalist claims. Covering ethnic groups around the world since 1946 through 2017, our findings are robust to the inclusion of control variables, fixed effects, and the use of alternative historical ethnicity data sets.

The Wrong Place at the Wrong Time? Territorial Autonomy and Conflict During Regime Transitions

“…3 By investigating the consequences of territorial autonomy during a comprehensive set of regime transitions around the world, we alleviate the challenge of selection bias (Figure 1, challenge 1). We rely on the SDM dataset (Sambanis et al, 2018), updated with Cederman et al (2022), to operationalize our dependent variables. This enables us to test hypothesis 1 and conduct a partial test of hypothesis 3 (in which we are, however, unable to account for recent concessions).…”

“…We rely on the SDM dataset ( Sambanis et al, 2018 ), updated with Cederman et al (2022) , to operationalize our dependent variables. This enables us to test hypothesis 1 and conduct a partial test of hypothesis 3 (in which we are, however, unable to account for recent concessions).…”

“…Across our models, we control for factors that might influence both a group’s degree of autonomy and its involvement in SDMs or that might simultaneously increase the probability of regime transitions and ethnic mobilization ( Figure 1 , challenges 2a/3a). At the group level, we control for politically most powerful status, 5 central government inclusion, relative size (all three based on Vogt et al, 2015 ), distance from the state border (logarithmized), whether a group is subject to irredentist claims from a kin state government ( Cederman et al, 2022 ), whether there are simultaneous SDMs involving a kin group (based on Germann & Sambanis, 2021 ; Vogt et al, 2015 ), and the percentage of its settlement area covered by discovered petroleum reserves (based on Lujala et al, 2007 ). At the country-level, we control for the level of democracy, given by a corrected version of the Polity index (normalized to a range of 0–1, Marshall et al, 2019 ), to exclude the problematic PARREG component ( Vreeland, 2008 ), GDP per capita, and population size (both logarithmized).…”

Differentiation in the European Union and beyond

“…4 The struggle for self-determination is a powerful motivation in politics, and it is by some measures the greatest source of political violence in the world. 5 It has provoked most civil wars, as in Yugoslavia (1991–2001), Nigeria (1967–1970), and Sri Lanka (1983–2009); and it often underlies interstate war as in Ukraine's resistance to Russian annexation (Cederman et al, 2022b).…”

Irredentism and Institutions

“…Most previous research on irredentist conflict has focused on single case studies (Andreopoulos 1981;Borsody 1988;Gagnon 1995;Gavrilis 2003;Gutman 1991;Haines 1937;Kitromilides 1990;Kolstø, Edemsky, and Kalashnikova 1993;Landau 1991;Munck 1999;Petacco 1998;Plaut 1999;Siroky 2016;Suhrke 1975) comparative case studies (Chazan 1991;Horowitz 1991;Saideman and Ayres 2000), and, more recently, statistical analysis of global data (Cederman, Girardin, and Gleditsch 2009;Cederman, Rüegger, and Schvitz 2021;Cederman et al 2013;Siroky and Hale 2017). Theoretically, these studies are also diverse.…”