Issue Indivisibility, Nationalism, and Civil War Recurrence
Julian Wucherpfennig (ETH Zurich)
The paper addresses the empirical regularity that approximately one in two civil wars was preceded by a previous civil war in the same country. While dominant explanations of civil war focus on contemporaneous conditions or future expectations, I argue that scholars have been all too quick to dismiss historical effects as irrelevant. Building on a combination of rationalist and constructivist insights, I adopt a more dynamic perspective. I show empirically that past violence is a determinant of at least one type of civil conflict, namely when the dispute is territorial in nature. For the ethnic group, prior conflict over territory reinforces the constructed legitimacy of the territorial claim, strengthens the salience of ethnicity, and renders the territory under dispute as effectively indivisible. For the government, past involvement in violence against a separatist group demonstrates clear determination to avoid precedent setting to other groups, thus also creating issue indivisibility. Taken in conjunction, this removes any bargaining space between the ethnic group and the government, which then leads to a recurrence of violence over territory.