“Hawking” territorial conflict: ethnopopulism and nationalist framing strategies

ABSTRACT

Does ethnopopulism increase domestic support for revisionist foreign policies? This question is especially relevant for former socialist bloc countries, where claims regarding cross-border kin and lost homelands imbue ethnopopulist discourse. Distinguishing between hawkish and irredentist publics, this article argues that irredentists’ ideological commitments actually limit their receptivity to ethnopopulists’ non-ideological claims. This proposition is tested via survey experiments in Serbia and Israel: two formal democracies with assertively nationalist publics and disputed international boundaries in dissimilar geopolitical contexts. Common findings suggest generalisable limits on ethnopopulists’ ability to mobilise popular support even among core constituencies, with critical implications for Eastern Europe and beyond.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnopopulism
• framing
• irredentism
• Israel
• Serbia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ariel Zellman is a lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at Bar Ilan University. His research focuses on how politicisation of national identity narratives influence popular attitudes toward territorial revisionism and their implications for patterns of international territorial conflict. His most recent articles include “Uneven ground: Nationalist frames and the variable salience of homeland”, which appeared in Security Studies in 2018 and “Cheap talk or policy lock? Nationalist frames and sympathetic audience costs in international territorial disputes” which appeared in Territory, Politics, Governance in 2019.

ORCID

Ariel Zellman http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1106-1282

Notes

1 Ethnopopulism is defined by Jenne (2018, 550) as “a discourse which equates ‘the people’ with ‘the nation’ and holds that sovereignty should be an expression of the will of the ‘nation-people.’” Ethnopopulism is therefore largely equivalent to radical right populism as defined by Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser (2018, 1677), Rydgren (2007), and others.

2 For further discussion of this article's definition of hawks versus doves and the extent to which experimental data confirms the distinctness of these participant populations, see Appendix I.

3 Regarding the replicability of artifactual and lab-based experiments versus representative population-based survey experiments, see Mullinix et al. (2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Northwestern University (Dispute Resolution Research Center grant, Kellogg).