Nation-Building and the Role of Identity in Civil Wars

Abstract

What is the relationship between politically relevant identities and violent dynamics within civil wars? Civil war scholars over the last decade have studied intra-war dynamics, such as the proliferation of rebel groups, alliances among belligerents, and cohesion within insurgent organisations. But a nation-building perspective has not been adequately integrated into this research program. We suggest that once we consider the socio-political orders established by their respective nation-building experience, we can make better sense of the patterns of variation in the role of identity in civil war fractionalisation. To elucidate our argument, we review three recent books that offer distinct approaches to how salient identities influence civil war processes. Prior nation-building emerges as an important antecedent variable to reconcile existing arguments.

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this article have been presented at the Annual World Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, New York (4 May 2018); the International Studies Association’s 57th Annual Convention, Atlanta, Georgia (16–19 March 2016); the Comparative Politics Workshop of The University of Chicago (6 May 2015); 2015 Association for the Study of Nationalities World Convention in New York (24 April 2015) and at the Research in Progress workshop at George Washington University’s Institute for Security and Conflict Studies (January 2015) and received useful feedback. We would also like to thank Laia Balcells, Zeynep Bulutgil, Austin Doctor, Stas Gorelik, Michael Joseph, and Lucy Hale for their helpful comments.

Notes

1 For example, research on civil war termination continued to be an active field of study since the beginning. See Howard & Stark (2018); and the special Winter 2018 issue of Daedalus.

2 Scholars, however, contested this linear relationship between ethnic fractionalisation and civil war onset. Some proposed a nonlinear relationship: countries with moderate ethnic fractionalisation have ethnic groups that are distinct and large enough to maintain group cohesion (Collier & Hoeffler, 2004).

3 Salient religious cleavages prolong civil wars because religious differences distort communication, making peaceful settlement more difficult, particularly in interstate conflicts (Leng & Regan, 2003); and religious claims can create indivisible sacred spaces that make negotiated settlements more difficult (Hassner, 2003; Pearce, 2005; Svensson, 2007). For arguments against a relationship between religious fractionalisation and war duration, see Collier, Hoeffler, & Söderbom (2004); Fox (2004); Tusicisny (2004); Walter (1997).

4 For arguments against a relationship between ethnicity and civilian victimisation, see Balcells (2017); Valentino, Huth, & Balch-Lindsay (2004); Wood (2010).

5 For a critique, see Robinson (2014). She argues that the colonial legacy of African countries is not a determinative obstacle to the successful cultivation of national identification over subnational ethnic identification.

6 Mobilisation can also occur in response to economic incentives (Weinstein, 2006).

7 Cross-cutting cleavages are a potential source of fragmentation see Bulutgil (2016).

8 This is not to say coding these groups would be easy. Although Staniland identifies cases for each type of insurgent organisation, satisfactory coding of all warring groups is easier said than done.

9 For more on this see Darden & Mylonas (2012).

10 This poststructural perspective is articulated most thoroughly and forcefully by Kalyvas (2006).

11 We focus on the way nation-building efforts can circumscribe the agency of elites, but this does not discount social-structural variables. Siroky and Hechter (2016) find that different configurations of inequality between and within groups predict the primary basis of group conflict, ethnic vs. class. The process of nation-building would moderate the effects of economic inequality between and within groups by subsuming group distinctions within a cohesive national identity. After all, ranked ethnic group systems (Horowitz, 1985), which block social mobility, are the target of nation-building efforts.

12 On alliance formation in civil wars, see also Bapat & Bond (2012).

13 A number of scholars have theorised about how shared identities are used prospectively for mobilisation of public support and to attract recruits and resources. Snyder (2000) popularised ‘outbidding’ theories that modeled political elites as vying for the title of most credible defender of the nation in a process of nationalist outbidding (see also Gormley-Heenan & Macginty, 2008; Saikia, 2015). Toft (2007, p. 103) applied this model to religious conflict wherein elites try to outbid each other in terms of religious credentials to obtain the necessary external and domestic support. With a different twist, Brass (1997) proposed that domestic elites manipulate religious cleavages to legitimise secular aims or mobilise the masses for political struggle.

14 McCauley discounts ethnicity’s capacity for stimulating international involvement, but this is possibly due to his scope conditions that limit his explanation to Africa. In contrast, Saideman (2012) argues that ethnic kinship plays a similar role. Moreover, for Saideman, transnational ethnic ties are exogenous and ‘real,’ rather than the result of strategic decisions made by elites.

15 Christia and McCauley are not the only scholars who give elites asymmetric agency vis-à-vis their followers (e.g. Van Belle, 1996; De Figueiredo & Weingast, 1999), but other scholars assign more agency to individuals (e.g. Kalyvas, 2006). Others treat social identification and identity polarisation as endogenous to violence itself (e.g. Kuran, 1998; Sambanis & Shayo, 2013).

16 One potential objection to prior nation-building as a scope condition is that the success or extensiveness of nation-building efforts may very well be a function of initial group divisions, diversity, and conflict histories. There may be cases where nation-building is incomplete because greater ethnic diversity undermines the nation-building process and at the same time creates a context for multiparty conflicts when conflicts do occur. But this is more of interest to scholars trying to explain nation-building outcomes. For our purposes, we are ambivalent about the causes of nation-building success or failure. If the cases of theoretical interest, for example, involve ethnically diverse populations despite prior nation-building attempts, then this is a potentially significant scope condition (for more on the caveats in the study of nation-building see Mylonas, 2015).