Separatism as a Bargaining Posture: The Role of Leverage in Minority Radicalization

Abstract

Why do some minorities seek affirmative action while others pursue territorial autonomy or secession, given similar conditions at the substate level? This article attempts to unpack the puzzle of minority radicalization, focusing on group claim-making as an important dynamic that has been overlooked by much of the recent quantitative literature on ethnic conflict. To address this gap, the authors introduce a new 'claims' variable, which codes the demands made by groups in the Minorities at Risk dataset for three five-year periods from 1985 to 2000. The authors examine the relationship between minority claim-making and rebellion and conclude that they are similar but distinct forms of group mobilization. Groups use claims as a means of bargaining with the center; relative power, therefore, has a critical influence on the extremity of demands that groups advance against the government. The authors test this model against alternative arguments using ordinal logit analysis and find that factors related to strategic power -including a history of autonomy, outside military support, and territorial concentrationare all positively correlated with a group's propensity to advance more extreme demands. This study shows that minorities with greater power vis-à-vis the center are more likely to both rebel and mobilize around separatist demands. However, minority rebellion -unlike separatist claims -may also be triggered by group deprivation, indicating that violent resistance may be driven by grievances as well as opportunities.* The dataset is available at

Political Elites and Decentralization Reforms in the Post-Socialist Balkans

“…11 When national elites are challenged with regional demands for more autonomy, they cannot be completely sure whether elites in the periphery will moderate their demands once basic decentralization is agreed upon. This is similar to the ethnic security dilemma mentioned in Section 2.1 and adopted by conflict studies (Posen 1993;Jenne et al 2007), with the difference that secessionist demands empirically occur less often than demands for decentralization within the overarching state. 12 Once powers are decentralized to lower levels of government, it is much more difficult for the centre to return these powers than it is for the periphery to maintain them (Hooghe et al 2010).…”

“…After the end of the Cold War, there was a surge of studies on ethnic conflict and civil war in the literature on comparative politics and international relations (Horowitz 1985;Posen 1993;Diamond and Plattner 1994;Fearon and Laitin 2003;Hechter 2004;Jenne et al 2007;Cederman et al 2009). Given the large number of intra-state conflicts since the fall of the Soviet Union, and the decline of wars between states, scholars have increasingly focused on the causes of civil and ethnically motivated conflicts.…”

“…Broadly speaking, these studies deal with the particularities of ethnic minorities themselves, the relations with their kin-state and those with the majority population (Brubaker 1995b;Kelley 2004). Some studies try to incorporate all these dimensions into one model of ethnically motivated bargaining between minorities and central governments, which assumes that the implications of ethnic belonging are key in understanding autonomy claims and policies (Jenne 2006;Jenne et al 2007). Two important caveats concerning the assumptions of the ethnically based approach deserve closer attention.…”

Peace building after Civil War: A Critical Survey of the Literature and Avenues for Future Research

“…Although there is strong empirical support for this argument, much remains to be understood. On the one hand, poverty was found to be significant in the studies of attitudes to rebellion (MacCullogh and Pezzini, 2007), in the analysis of participation (Justino, 2012;Humphreys and Weinstein, 2008) and in the behaviour of groups (Jenne Saideman and Lowe, 2007) 12 . Indeed, cross-country empirical analyses of civil war point to poverty or low-per capita income as one of the most robust explanations for the outbreak, duration and recurrence of violent internal conflict (for an excellent review see Fearon and Laitin, 2003;Collier and Hoeffler, 2004;Dixon, 2009;Blattman and Miguel, 2010).…”

Kosovo and the Framing of Non-Secessionist Self-Government Claims in Romania

“…First, much of the International Relations literature on territorial claims tends to focus on minority claims only after they have already become 'securitised', that is, once violence is either imminent or ongoing. Once a secessionist option is on the table, it represents a threat to domestic and regional security (Saideman 2001;Harff & Gurr 2004;Jenne 2007;Jenne et al 2007;Saideman & Ayres 2008). For those situated within this security paradigm, non-secessionist and secessionist claims appear as though they formed a continuum of essentially the same type of claims.…”