Nation-Building and The Role of Identity in Civil Wars 2022

Ethnopolitics, 2022
Vol. 21, No. 1, 1–21, https://doi.org/10.1080/17449057.2019.1684095
Nation-Building and the Role of Identity

in Civil Wars
KENDRICK KUO & HARRIS MYLONAS

Department of Political Science, George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA
A BSTRACT 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.
Christia, Fotini (2012). Alliance Formation in Civil Wars. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
McCauley, John F. (2017). The Logic of Ethnic and Religious Conflict in Africa.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Staniland, Paul (2014). Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and
Collapse. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Introduction
What is the relationship between politically relevant identities and violent dynamics within
civil wars? In particular, how do shared identities—ethnic, religious, ideological, or
regional—influence the formation of alliances or the proliferation of warring groups in a
conflict? When, how, and why might identity salience change during the course of a
civil war? These questions animate recent theories of civil war dynamics, which are reco-
vering from a narrow focus on materialist factors at the micro- and meso-levels of conflict.
Scholars are pioneering new perspectives that integrate non-materialist factors, particularly
ideology, into explanations of warring group behavior (e.g. Sanín & Wood, 2014; Thaler,
2012). We argue that these perspectives can be widened even further to encompass the
Correspondence Address: Department of Political Science, George Washington University, 2115 G street, NW,
suite 440, Washington, DC, 20052, USA. Email: mylonas@gwu.edu
© 2019 The Editor of Ethnopolitics

2 K. Kuo & H. Mylonas
macro-historical context of each civil war. Specifically, the internal processes of civil war
are intimately shaped by the country’s prior experiences with nation-building (Mylonas,
2017).
In this article, we focus on three books that represent the current state of theoretical inno-
vation on internal civil war dynamics. These books also offer distinct approaches to how
salient identities influence civil war processes. Fotini Christia’s Alliance Formation in
Civil Wars explains alliance formation and change among warring groups and group frag-
mentation. Her central argument is that the relative balance of power among warring
groups, not shared identities, determines alliance stability between groups and cohesion
within groups. In Networks of Rebellion, Paul Staniland studies warring group cohesion
and fragmentation, which he attributes to the group’s organisational structure, derived
largely from prewar social bases. And John McCauley’s more recent The Logic of
Ethnic and Religious Conflict in Africa proposes a theory of conflict framing during civil
wars that accounts for why conflicts emerge along different societal cleavages and how con-
flict frames can change over time. Although the three scholars are interested in explaining
different kinds of civil war dynamics, they all speak to the role of prewar socio-political
institutions in shaping those dynamics.
In assessing these books, we draw on insights from studies of nationalism and nation-
building to explicate why some of the arguments developed in these significant works do
not travel to other parts of the world. Nation-building refers to the process of rendering
the state and the nation congruent, mainly through the construction of ‘majorities’ on
which legitimate and popular rule is based (Gellner, 1983; Mylonas, 2012; Wimmer,
2018). By introducing basic notions about the process of nation-building and identity for-
mation, we make sense of the varying role of identity in different civil war contexts. More
specifically, we suggest that each book’s argument has a better explanatory fit in certain
nation-building contexts than in others. Finally, we suggest that disagreements between the-
ories concerning their understanding of the role of identity in civil wars could be reconciled
if we consider particular scope conditions, namely the extent and success of prior nation-
building (Darden & Mylonas, 2016).
The Role of Identity in Civil War Research

With the end of the Cold War, the scholarly community shifted its attention from the study
of interstate conflict to a systematic study of intrastate conflicts (e.g. Collier et al., 2003;
Esty et al., 1998; Licklider, 1995). This move ironically coincided with a decline in the
onset of new civil wars across all major regions starting around 1994 (Sambanis, 2002,
p. 215). Throughout the Cold War, the total number of ongoing civil wars increased steadily
until the early 1990s because the average duration of civil wars increased over time, result-
ing in an accumulation of lengthy conflicts, most of which were fought as irregular or guer-
rilla wars (Fearon, 2017, p. 19; Kalyvas & Balcells, 2010). Civil war studies can be divided
into three waves, each of which continues to lap onto the shores of contemporary research.1
More importantly for our framework, each wave has had corollary effects on the way scho-
lars studied the intersection of identity and civil war.
The first wave of research focused on the causes of civil war onset and issues related to
the duration and termination of conflict (Collier & Hoeffler, 2004; Fearon & Laitin, 2003).
Factors associated with identity categories, particularly ethnicity, were deemed to have
direct causal effects on the outbreak and length of civil wars. Identities could be loci for
Nation-Building and the Role of Identity in Civil Wars 3
grievance generation (e.g. Cederman, Gleditsch, & Buhaug, 2013; Gurr, 1993; Horowitz,
1985; Kaufman, 2001; Petersen, 2002), offer mobilisational opportunities and advantages
(e.g. Bates, 1983; Bormann, Cederman, & Vogt, 2017; Gagnon, 2006), and undermine
peace negotiations (e.g. Cunningham & Weidmann, 2010; Goddard, 2006; Hassner,
2003; Toft, 2006).2 Identity salience was also correlated with the duration of civil wars.
‘Ethnicized’ civil wars were protracted conflicts (Balch-Lindsay & Enterline, 2000).
Some scholars argued that ethnic conflicts were more intractable than ideological ones
since hypernationalist rhetoric and inter-ethnic violence ossifies ethnic cleavages; and
‘intermingled population settlement patterns’ foster security dilemmas that prevent de-esca-
lation (Kaufmann, 1996, p. 137). Yet, for other scholars, characteristics of the rebel group
(Cunningham, Gleditsch, & Salehyan, 2009) or the political institutionalisation of identity
(Wucherpfennig, Metternich, Cederman, & Gleditsch, 2012) mediated the effect of ethni-
city on war duration. In many ways, researchers in the first wave treated shared identities as
an exogenous variable in civil wars and regarded their salience as relatively fixed.
An exogenous approach to shared identity, however, had trouble making sense of intra-
group violence and defection. The second research wave tried to account for these
anomalies by focusing on the microfoundations of violence in civil wars (Kalyvas, 2003,
2006) and disaggregating conflict from violence (Brubaker & Laitin, 1998; Laitin &
Fearon, 2000; Weinstein, 2006). The chief representative of the second wave is Kalyvas
(2008), who problematised the war type literature by pointing to the incongruence
between the master cleavage and local logics for collaboration and defection. Thus, we
can speak of a joint production of violence, or in Kalyvas’s terminology an ‘alliance’
between local and supralocal actors. Shared identities are of instrumental value. They are
endogenous to other motivators of political violence and, as such, the salience of a
shared identity is malleable.
Just as the second wave corrected for shortcomings in the first, the endogenous approach
has struggled to explain situations where the framing of a conflict has tangible effects on
escalatory violence and civilian victimisation. Civil wars where religion is a central issue
seem to have higher casualties, a higher likelihood of recurrence, and tend to last longer
(Toft, 2006).3 Moreover, the notion of ethnic wars being hotter and longer than nonethnic
wars is quite common (Kaufman, 2006; Rothman, 1997; Stavenhagen, 1996; Waterman,
1993). There is also evidence that ethnicised conflicts experience a higher frequency of civi-
lian victimisation, whether as a result of ethnic cleansing (Weidmann, 2011) or strategic
incentives to target civilian supporters of an ethnic adversary (Fjelde & Hultman, 2014).4
A third and ongoing wave of civil war research has tried to synthesise exogenous and
endogenous approaches to identity politics. Recently, for example, Laia Balcells (Balcells,
2017, p. 43, 183) has challenged post-structural approaches that treat ‘local dynamics of
violence as completely apolitical,’ arguing instead that private hatreds, while personally
motivated, tend to fall along prewar political divides that shape attitudes, preferences,
and allegiances. This new wave has coincided with a shift in topical focus to intra-conflict
dynamics such as rebel governance (e.g. Arjona, Kasfir, & Mampilly, 2015; Huang, 2012;
Mampilly, 2011), the internal politics of warring groups and opposition movements (e.g.
Cunningham, 2014; Krause, 2017), as well as the relationship between warring groups in
multiparty civil wars (e.g. Bakke, Cunningham, & Seymour, 2012; Seymour, Bakke, &
Cunningham, 2016).
The study of these topics is in full swing, but corollary research on identity as it relates to
these phenomena is still in its developing stages. The three books reviewed here belong to
this third wave and make theoretical contributions to how we should think about salient
identities in civil war processes. These three scholars explain a variety of civil war pro-
cesses, including coalition formation, change, and group fragmentation (Christia);
warring group cohesion (Staniland); and conflict framing during civil war (McCauley).
This third wave of research has generated various concepts to make an admittedly
complex phenomenon tractable for study. For clarity, we reserve the term ‘fractionalisation’
for the proliferation of warring groups in a civil war; and we use the term ‘fragmentation’ to
refer to the meso-level phenomenon of subgroup defections from a warring group. Fractio-
nalisation occurs when fragments from a warring group defect to form a new warring group,
expanding the number of relevant actors in a conflict. It can also occur when new warring
groups are mobilised. But, as Staniland shows, the type of warring group formed signifi-
cantly determines its cohesiveness (described below). There is thus a logical and defini-
tional relationship between civil war fractionalisation, warring group formation, and
warring group fragmentation.
In Alliance Formation in Civil Wars, Christia (2012) sets out to explain patterns of
coalition formation, which constitutes a warring side, side-switching, and group fragmenta-
tion. She concludes that there are two explanatory variables: relative power and shared
identity. Relative power shifts between coalitions cause groups to consider the possibility
of side-switching to increase their expected share of postwar political control. And
within warring groups, changes in relative power due to poor battlefield performance and
asymmetric losses can encourage intra-group fragmentation such that sub-groups
abandon the group or overthrow its leadership. Unlike relative power, shared identity has
heterogeneous effects. Identity is epiphenomenal at the coalition level of analysis, being
used instrumentally to justify power-driven coalition decisions according to a minimum
winning coalition logic. But at the warring group level, identity is critical for cohesion
among group members who are bound together by a strong sense of shared identity. She
tests her theory through case studies of Afghanistan and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Staniland’s Networks of Rebellion (2014) proposes a social-institutional theory of insur-
gent organisational structure and change. The origin and evolution of insurgent organis-
ations (or what we are calling ‘warring groups’) stem from prewar social bases, which
offer social resources to overcome collective action, including trust, information, and
shared political beliefs. Insurgent organisers build on these prewar networks, but social
bases vary in the kinds of social resources they provide. Social bases are made of vertical
ties between organisers and local communities and horizontal ties among the organisers
themselves. These ties can be strong or weak, and their combination produce four types
of warring groups (from most integrated to least): integrated, vanguard, parochial, and frag-
mented organisations. Not only do prewar social bases determine initial organisation struc-
tures, they also bestow strengths and weaknesses to the organisation that determine the
likely trajectory of change in the course of a civil war. Insurgent organisations desire to
move toward integration through innovative insurgent strategies that play to their strengths,
taking advantage of failed counterinsurgency policies, and with the help of international
support. Using case studies in Asia, Staniland applies his theory to insurgencies in
Kashmir, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, French Indochina, and Malaya.
Finally, in The Logic of Ethnic and Religious Conflict in Africa, McCauley (2017) asks
why conflicts in Africa are sometimes ethnic and sometimes religious, and why a conflict
might change from ethnic to religious even as the opponents remain fixed. Conflicts in
Africa are often viewed as rooted in deep-seated tribal, ethnic or religious hatreds.
McCauley suggests that the dominant identity frame emerges as a function of elite choices
in their effort to generate a following. For example, an ethnicity frame will inspire priorities
among individuals distinct from those of a religion frame. Political leaders manipulate these
frames to evoke the passions which will be the most helpful for them to achieve their own
strategic goals when state institutions are weak or break down. The author’s intuitions rely
on an experiment conducted in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana demonstrating that individual pre-
ferences change conditional to whether they were primed with an ethnic or a religious
context. He then tests the plausibility of this argument with case studies from Côte
d’Ivoire, Nigeria, and Sudan, where he demonstrates that leaders’ strategic choices deter-
mine conflict frames.
Based on this brief survey of the civil war literature and of these three particular books,
we identify a few notable gaps. First, identity groups have played a central role in discus-
sions about civil war onset, conflict dynamics, and termination, but the analysis is predo-
minantly limited to ethnic or religious identities. National identity has not received
similar systematic treatment in the study of civil war dynamics. Second, identity variables
are more causally important in some contexts than in others. These differences tend to be
attributed to the level of analysis, whether we are interested in individual psychology and
motives or in group behavior. In this article, we suggest that another significant context is
the global distribution of nation-building experiences, which can offer clues about where
group identification might be more or less sticky. Third, civil war research trends toward
evermore granular details as researchers make impressive strides through fieldwork. His-
torical context for these works often means a decade or so before the onset of civil war.
We believe, however, that a macro-historical approach has much to add. More specifically,
prewar nation-building experiences are a plausible scope condition that can either permit or
constrain civil war fractionalisation. In what follows, we unpack these points focusing on
the link between prior nation-building and civil war fractionalisation as it pertains to the
cases covered in the three books under review.
The Link Between Nation-Building and Civil War Fractionalisation

Nation-building is the process through which governing elites make the boundaries of the
state and the nation coincide. State elites motivated by a ‘homogenising imperative’ aim to
construct ‘majorities’ on which their rule is based (Gellner, 1983; Mylonas, 2012, p. xx).
Governing elites harmonise political and national units by constructing and propagating
a common national identity (Mylonas, 2012, pp. 17–23). Nation-building policies actively
seek to reduce politically relevant heterogeneity by imposing one constitutive story or foun-
dational narrative to legitimise authority and elicit deference—if not loyalty (Smith, 2001;
Straus, 2015). It shapes the identity cleavages available for political mobilisation and the
degree of resonance each cleavage carries. A powerful nation-building experience ‘can
indoctrinate previously unschooled populations into a coherent, shared national identity
and establish a common, durable national loyalty that supersedes previous ethnic, family,
and kinship ties, inoculates the population from external agitation, and ensures resistance
to alien rule’ (Darden & Mylonas, 2016, p. 1447).
State-building and nation-building were closely linked processes in European history.
The state centralised authority and used it to pursue a homogenisation imperative, more
often than not assimilating or eliminating subnational identities (Mylonas, 2012). But Euro-
pean colonies around the globe faced a different situation of weak states, heterogeneous
societies, and externally guaranteed fixed borders.5 The extension of Westphalian prin-
ciples across the world correlated with the increased frequency of civil wars after 1945
(Wimmer, 2012). De jure recognition and de facto state capacity were wedded to each
other prior to World War II, but the two became divorced in the postwar period as
former colonies and mandate territories received independence and juridical equality
(Spruyt, 2017, p. 114). In these new countries, state capacity building and political mobil-
isation occurred within a context of weak or non-existent national attachments—a legacy of
their experience under colonial rule (Huntington, 1968). For Darden and Mylonas, states
that faced threats to their territory were more likely to pursue nation-building to counter
that threat and prevent territorial loss (Darden & Mylonas, 2016). Alternatively, states
that developed in the absence of interstate competition, due to international norms and
agreements or because their borders were ‘guaranteed’ by a hegemonic power, were less
likely to pursue nation-building policies.
The onset of civil war is evidence that a nation-building project, if there ever was one, has
failed. The state has not successfully assimilated large swaths of the population, which in
turn makes mobilisation of new warring groups more plausible. Civil wars have changed
from contests of control over state power to ‘systems of violence [that] may originate in
political divisions but are perpetuated by a complex web of interests’ (Kissane, 2016,
p. 152). As such, a Hobbesian state-centred perspective is increasingly at a loss to
explain civil war dynamics. When state control weakens and societies disintegrate, ‘[t]he
fragments that result are neither random nor natural; they reflect pre-existing social
relations’ (Kissane, 2016, p. 224).
Building on this, we propose that the socio-political orders established by their respective
nation-building contexts shape global patterns of variation in civil war fractionalisation and
influence civil war dynamics endemic to multiparty conflicts. The type of nation-building
project and the level of successful implementation will structure mobilisation opportunities
for new warring groups, strengthen or weaken the ideational sinews of group cohesion, and
imbue certain identity-based claims with greater resonance than others.
We demonstrate the plausibility of prior nation-building as an important scope condition
by exploring the implications of prewar nation-building experiences for the three books
under review. We offer two tentative approaches to linking prior nation-building and
civil war fractionalisation. First, we consider how prior nation-building might condition
the intra-war dynamics of warring group formation and cohesion. Prior nation-building
can structure the mobilisation opportunities for certain types of warring groups to form,
which in turn can influence the level of cohesion within the groups which prove viable.
Second, we reason through the implications of prior nation-building for the malleability
of identity salience. Prior nation-building can imbue certain identities with greater salience
and identity-based claims with greater resonance. By generating identity stickiness, prior
nation-building challenges assumptions about identities as epiphenomenal. Instead, the
malleability of identity is an outcome that in itself varies.
Warring Group Formation and Cohesion

What is the relationship between the warring group formation process and warring group
cohesiveness? Earlier literature assumed that rebels organised naturally based on a nomin-
ally shared affinity group (Kaufman, 2001; Posen, 1993), but this approach eventually gave
way to the study of the micro-foundations of rebellion. Since the costs of rebellion are high,
and the outcome is a collective good, rational actors have an incentive to freeride rather than
participate. Shared identity—often ethnic—facilitates collective action through dense social
networks based on quotidian ties that encourage in-group bias, policing, and institutiona-
lised sanctioning and enforcement mechanisms (Fearon & Laitin, 1996; Habyarimana,
Humphreys, Posner, & Weinstein, 2007; Miguel & Gugerty, 2005; Parkinson, 2013; Peter-
sen, 2001).6 The causal mechanisms explaining the ability to organise rebellion are increas-
ingly more specified (e.g. Larson & Lewis, 2018; Lewis, 2017).
Scholars have also begun to specify more precisely the causes of warring group fragmen-
tation. Interest in warring group fragmentation was originally sparked by a dissatisfaction
with ‘groupism,’ the treatment of ethnic groups and nations as black-box entities with
unitary interests and hence unitary agency (Brubaker, 2004, p. 8; Humphreys, 2008).
Earlier work on identity groups argued that ethnic and religious identities naturally facili-
tated social group cohesion and elicited the allegiance of co-ethnics and co-religionists
(Gates, 2002). But warring groups are increasingly understood as facing a constant threat
of potential fragmentation and thus must be actively formed and sustained during
wartime (e.g. Bakke et al., 2012; Cunningham, 2006, 2011; Cunningham, Bakke, &
Seymour, 2012; Findley & Rudloff, 2012).
Group fragmentation can be attributed to various causes. The balance of power between
the state and rebel groups is a common explanation of group fragmentation. As state repres-
sion mounts, factions and individuals respond differently and beliefs about the best strategy
moving forward begin to diverge. Alternatively, growing repression can actually draw fac-
tions closer together as they face a common enemy (Kalyvas & Kocher, 2007). A middle
road between these two predictions is that the effects of repression depend on contentment
within a warring group regarding the internal status quo power distribution—internal dis-
content makes the group vulnerable to fragmentation, whereas contentment nullifies the
effects of repression (McLauchlin & Pearlman, 2012).
The interaction between the state and rebel groups or between the rebel groups and an
external patron are prominent explanations. These interactions can generate internal dis-
agreement over tactics and strategy. The shift toward increasingly violent tactics, for
example, may create internal divisions between moderates and hardliners. Moreover, the
perceptions about costs and benefits of fighting can change during the course of a conflict
as the state tries to reach an accommodation with rebel demands. Rebel leaders may dis-
agree about whether to accept a government settlement proposal; and competition
between factions over settlement benefits can result in ‘violent spoiling’ (Pearlman,
2009, 2011). State accommodation usually brings with it a new pool of resources, the
use of which can bring into sharp relief divergent visions among factions about the
future (Cunningham, 2011; Seymour et al., 2016). External support can foster group frag-
mentation as foreign actors introduce new preferences (Cunningham, 2010), shape the
actions of their rebel clients (Salehyan, Gleditsch, & Cunningham, 2011), and favor one
faction over another (Beardsley, Quinn, Biswas, & Wilkenfeld, 2006).
State capacity undoubtedly plays a role in determining the possibility of warring group
mobilisation and the likelihood of group fragmentation. But a focus on state repression can
obscure the social relations that underpin warring group formation.7 More importantly,
social relationships cannot be reduced to network maps because the content of social
relationships can be important—they are not created equal.
Staniland and Christia both make arguments about how warring group formation influ-
ences patterns of fragmentation. Staniland emphasises prewar social bases, which structure
insurgent organisations in wartime, whereas Christia treats warring groups as a fusion of

subgroups that enjoy a level of trust. The difference between the two approaches shape
their respective causal stories. For Staniland, the type of organisation structure matters
for how cohesive the group is, and the counterinsurgency strategy required for victory.
Christia instead emphasises the influence of relative power shifts within warring groups
and between them. Our ambition is not to adjudicate between these approaches. Instead,
we demonstrate how prior nation-building might condition their arguments and thereby
generate expectations about the distribution of cases (in the case of Staniland’s theory)
and where the argument will have the most explanatory value (in the case of Christia’s
theory).
In Networks of Rebellion, prewar social bases both determine initial organisation struc-
tures and also bestow strengths and weaknesses to the organisation when it comes to group
cohesion. Together with the state’s counterinsurgency strategy, these antecedent conditions
determine the likely trajectory of organisational change in the course of a civil war, and the
ability of a warring group to move toward an integrated structure.
Staniland’s social bases are not equivalent to shared identity groups, but they are also not
entirely separable. They are social-ideational networks within a shared identity group that
were politically mobilised prior to the civil war. Staniland (2014, p. 221) acknowledges that
social bases are constructed in peace and war by the ‘forces of nationalism, communism,
and Islamism, among others.’ He also makes clear that social ties are not static: Insurgent
leaders can strategically use these ideational and social resources to mobilise for war. But
leaders generally rely on their prewar social bases because reshaping relationships and pol-
itical meanings is very difficult.
The ultimate origin of social bases is not as central for our argument as why certain hori-
zontal and vertical ties were permitted by the prewar state to persist, and why these ties
carried the potential for violent mobilisation against the wartime state. To be sure, the
state is not the only organisation that cultivates prewar identity. There are other organis-
ations such as political parties, religious institutions, or trade unions that cultivate identities
which cross-cut national or ethnic identity. These types of organisations would not necess-
arily be eliminated by nation-building. Having said that, we suggest that nation-building
policies shape social bases and their constitutive ties, which in turn can shape the distri-
bution of warring group types. In other words, if we were to code Staniland’s argument
across the globe we might find systematic differences in the types of groups that exist in
various countries conditional to their experiences with nation-building.8 Nation-building
policies can also, simultaneously, shape the machinery available to a state for counterinsur-
gency, such as the political option to accommodate rebel demands or the tactical instru-
ments of collaboration with locals and denunciation of counterinsurgents. Put another
way, nation-building can be construed as ‘preemptive counterinsurgency’ through an
active effort to mold social bases and develop the state’s own horizontal and vertical
ties. Nation-building may not be the only process shaping social bases, but it affects ‘the
realm of the possible.’ Nation-building policies involve a constitutive story that demarcates
legitimate political space in which bargaining over preferences can occur.9 Which politi-
cised oppositions will be allowed to exist once a nation-building process has begun
depends on how the constitutive story has been defined by the elites who are driving it.
Staniland’s four types of insurgent organisations are not randomly distributed and likely
cluster by region or country. Take, for example, countries with decentralised nation-build-
ing experiences. Decentralised nation-building establishes semi-autonomous territories
where certain social groups are not assimilated into a centralised constitutive story. In such
scenarios, rebellions often occur under the banner of peripheral nationalism led by inte-
grated warring groups. These strong horizontal and vertical ties—the characteristics of inte-
gration—are the outcome of three possible logics. First, a nationalising policy from the
central government can increase solidarity among groups in the periphery of a state
(Hechter, 2000). Second, a federal state context can increase the political mobilisation
around peripheral groups’ interests and allows the political space do so because the tensions
between state and national interests weaken national political parties (Chandler & Chandler,
1987; Desposato, 2004; Mainwaring, 1999; Weyland, 1996). And third, there can be a
selection effect where only the most integrated social bases survive attempts by the state
to fulfill a homogenising imperative. All three logics support the expectation that civil
wars in countries with a decentralised nation-building experience will exhibit more inte-
grated groups. More integrated groups lower the likelihood of group fragmentation,
which in turn decreases the probability of civil war fractionalisation.
While prior nation-building helps us generate expectations about the cross-national dis-
tribution of Staniland’s organisation types, it helps us endogenise Christia’s scope con-
ditions. In Alliance Formation in Civil Wars, Christia (2012, p. 35) does not attempt a
full explanation of warring group formation. She acknowledges that ‘identity groups
provide the building blocks from which warring actors are formed; within these groups,
identity is indeed a powerful bond, with subgroups only splitting off when their survival
is at stake.’ Only shared identities that can assuage the commitment problem—negating
the logic of minimum winning coalitions through trust—become warring groups (Christia,
2012, p. 8). Therefore, in Christia’s theory (2012, p. 243), group fragmentation only occurs
‘in contexts of asymmetric losses or when the group’s survival is at stake, and not when the
group is winning’ because shared identity lessens the ‘importance that subgroups attach to
the maximisation of postwar political control compared to the groups themselves.’ Sub-
group constituents do not fear subgroups of the same warring group will betray them
when it is time to divide postwar political power (Christia, 2012, p. 43). The minimum
winning coalition logic is pushed up to the alliance level.
Christia (2012, p. 217) is aware of the counterargument ‘that there is a selection at play
whereby some omitted variable determines both (1) whether a conflict is multiparty (and
thus enters the universe of cases) and (2) influences subsequent alliances and fractionalisation
dynamics.’ Using quantitative tests, she disqualifies state weakness, the number of ethnic div-
isions, population size, status as an oil exporter, and prior war as causes of omitted variable
bias in her results. She does not, however, consider the role of nation-building.
From a nation-building perspective, Christia’s comparison of Afghanistan and Bosnia
and Herzegovina (BiH) is a curious one. Afghanistan historically experienced very episodic
nation-building, whereas BiH is a classic case of decentralised nation-building within the
Habsburg empire, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and later on within the
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. On the one hand, Afghanistan has four main
ethnic groups with varying demographic size and military power, along with multiple
cross-cutting cleavages (i.e. racial, linguistic, religious/sectarian). On the other hand, BiH
has three ethnic groups, also of varying demographic size and military power, but along
one primary cleavage dimension—religion.
The selection of Afghanistan (1978–1989, 1992–1998) and BiH (1941–1945, 1992–
1995) allow Christia (2012, pp. 26–27) to focus on testing relative power and shared iden-
tity arguments, while leaving aside other competing explanations such as alliance politics,
institutional theory, and the role of state action. But what if the story is endogenous to cohe-
siveness at the warring group level? Thus, in places where there is weak nation-building we
expect more group fragmentation. Christia (2012, p. 43) acknowledges that a larger number
of constituent subgroups leads to a higher probability of fragmentation because of a greater
opportunity for disagreement and defection. She does not, however, consider a competing
explanation for variation in fragmentation, namely the existence of a nation-building
process behind subgroup assimilation into a particular group identity. In other words,
why are some groups more internally differentiated than others?
The population living in BiH had been targeted with nation-building policies, which
developed three distinct loci of national consciousness. When Christia (2012, p. 197)
describes the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims in the Bosnian Civil War (1992–1995), she
calls them ‘constituent nations residing in Bosnia.’ Looking across both Bosnian civil
wars, Christia registers only one group split, which occurred in 1993: The division
between Muslims in Western Bosnia, who formed the Autonomous Province of Western
Bosnia (APWB), and their kin in Eastern Bosnia and Sarajevo, led by the Fifth Corps of
the Republic of BiH Army. The APWB established an alliance with Serb and Croat
forces, but the identity narrative justifying this decision remained based on their Muslim
identity within the vision of a multiethnic (or multinational) order. Both subgroups that
emerged from the split remained wedded to their national identity as Bosnian Muslims,
but the western faction espoused accommodation while the eastern faction proposed exclu-
sion of non-Muslim identities. Neither held visions of assimilation. Assimilation requires
cross-cutting cleavages that can be used to bridge identity silos, but only overlapping clea-
vages existed due to decentralised nation-building. Contrast this with the case of Afghani-
stan where identity narratives seem to emerge and vanish with ease. Christia (2012, p. 275)
disaggregates Afghanistan’s internal conflict into three periods, within each of which she
identifies instances of group fragmentation in PDPA, Wahdat, Hizb-i Islami, and the
Taliban (the latter two groups splitting twice).
We believe that introducing variation in prior nation-building adds two qualifications to
Christia’s decision to limit the scope of her theory to multiparty civil wars. First, there is an
observational equivalence problem between her minimum winning coalition mechanism
and our nation-building logic with regards to civil war fractionalisation. In Christia’s
account, strong states experience binary civil wars because relative power is heavily
skewed in one direction, in favor of the state. A strong central government discourages sub-
groups within the government from defecting to the rebels since the chance of complete
rebel victory is low (Christia, 2012, p. 7, 35). From a nation-building perspective, we
would expect binary civil wars to occur more frequently in places with extensive nation-
building experiences, and less frequently in countries with limited nation-building experi-
ences and with high levels of illiteracy (Darden & Mylonas, 2016). Given her universe of
cases, of course, it is impossible to adjudicate between our two perspectives. She limits her
theory to multiparty civil wars that tend to be associated with weak states. But historical
cases of nation-building attest to a substantive correlation between state-building and
nation-building. State centralisation and assimilation of subnational identities go hand in
hand.
Second, Christia’s theory is most satisfying when applied to countries with failed nation-
building experiences. The lack of nation-building in Afghanistan helps us make sense of the
frequency of group splits in her case studies. Prior nation-building or lack thereof can shape
the identity narratives being used instrumentally by warring group elites. As we pointed out
in the case of Staniland’s social bases, the process of nation-building by definition manip-
ulates the arrangement of politically relevant identity cleavages, the prewar fault lines along
which group fragmentation occurs. The fact that there was one primary cleavage in BiH and
multiple cross-cutting cleavages in Afghanistan is not an accident. Not all multiparty civil
wars are the same because some societies have more malleable identities than others, which
in turn might be a function of prior nation-building.
All in all, it is plausible to suggest that the variation in group formation and the inter-
twined propensity for subgroup defection is, at least partly, endogenous to the absence
of nation-building in places like Afghanistan, the decentralised or incomplete nation-build-
ing in places like Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and the relatively extensive
nation-building in places like France or Greece. There appears to be a theoretically interest-
ing correlation between variation in nation-building experiences and in the level of civil war
fractionalisation.
Malleability of Identity
An obvious distinction between binary and multiparty civil wars has already been alluded
to: The role of identity. Theories of civil war dynamics necessarily make claims about the
causal power of shared identity groups. Many theories built for binary civil wars imply that
shared identity and its associated political preferences play a significant role in how warring
groups mobilise and fight. Even the language used to describe each side can betray this
assumption. Ethnic groups, for example, can be treated as coherent actors. Binary civil
wars are fought along a cleavage with ideational appeal to both warring sides.
But as scholars turn to multiparty civil wars, the substantive effects of identity variables
are now increasingly suspect. Fratricide within warring groups and subgroup defections to
an opposing side bring into question the causal weight of shared identity. The malleability
of identity salience is now the dominant paradigm in the field.10 Cleavages in multiparty
civil wars are framed and reframed multiple times and warring groups experience fractio-
nalisation and fragmentation within. Elites manipulate identity narratives to justify their cal-
culated moves; combatants join the fight for mixed motives; and civilians take advantage of
wartime conditions to carry out personal vendettas wrapped in ideational garb. Conflict
between combatants that nominally share a social identity, religious belief, or ideology is
no longer surprising. Identity-based discourse might permeate a civil war, but they mask
or are endogenous to more fundamental dynamics.
Many civil wars begun during the Cold War as ideological conflicts between communist
and anti-communist forces were transformed into ethnic conflicts when the Soviet Union
ceased to play a meaningful role. Conflicts fought along ethnic rather than ideological clea-
vages grew throughout the Cold War, rising from 60 percent of civil wars in the years after
World War II to around 70–75 percent since the end of the Cold War (Fearon, 2017, p. 20).
More recently, jihadist ideology has emerged as a resonant call to arms (Jones, 2016, p. 12;
Kalyvas, 2018). Civil wars involving jihadist rebel groups leaped from 5 percent of civil
wars in 1990 to more than 40 percent in 2014 (Fearon, 2017, p. 22). The shifts in conflict
framing suggest that master cleavages are malleable, opening space for actors to exercise
agency.
What would incorporating a nation-building perspective mean for actors’ agency in civil
wars? Scholars of nation-building would argue that exposure to homogenising policies ulti-
mately constrains the options available to actors. Decades of research on ethnic identity
formation demonstrate that its malleability lies somewhere between hard primordialism and
infinite flexibility (Laitin, 1998). Models of identity malleability in armed conflict similarly
run the gamut from essentialist assumptions to post-structural skepticism.
By introducing a nation-building perspective, the degree of malleability becomes a vari-
able outcome to be explained rather than something we can assume ex ante.11 First, nation-
building could limit the repertoire of identity cleavages available for manipulation, whether
by shaping the cleavage configuration (i.e. overlapping or cross-cutting) or depoliticising
certain identity cleavages altogether. Second, nation-building could limit the number of
identities capable of sustaining wartime mobilisation by imbuing certain identity types
with substantive content that shapes both its resonance amongst the population and its
relationship to wartime goals. Through both paths—limiting repertoires and shaping reson-
ance—nation-building can impose institutions that limit the malleability of identity. These
causal pathways can also help us make sense of the differences between existing theories
developed in contexts with widely different nation-building trajectories.
Both Christia and McCauley accept that identity salience is an outcome to be explained,
but they offer different explanations. For Christia, elites use identity narratives to justify
tactical alliances. They are epiphenomenal to the minimum winning coalition logic that
is truly driving elite decision-making. McCauley, similarly, argues that elites manipulate
conflict frames. He suggests that individuals are very responsive to elite cues, which
aligns with Christia’s finding that the behavior of local Afghan commanders was congruent
with the master cleavage promoted by elites. But McCauley introduces a different dimen-
sion to the conversation between constructivists and primordialists by proposing that the
meaning attached to an identity type matters, not just the ability of actors to switch identi-
ties. Elites have agency to choose between conflict frames—in McCauley’s study, the
choice is between religion and ethnicity—but each conflict frame offers them different
power resources. In short, for Christia identity narratives are epiphenomenal and thus com-
pletely interchangeable, whereas for McCauley different identity types are consequential
for mobilisational outcomes.
How might nation-building experiences explain this difference? A useful heuristic is to
divide the function of identity narratives and conflict frames between retroactive and pro-
spective instruments. Christia’s causal story features a retroactive use of identity narratives,
whereby elites make decisions first and come up with an identity-based justification in retro-
spect. The elites in McCauley’s theory consider the mobilisational differences between
available identity types and make prospective decisions based on which resources they
plan to draw upon. Both retrospective and prospective uses of identity seem necessary to
appreciate (rational) elite decision-making. Identity types are both a constraint and an
opportunity; and the balance might be determined by prewar nation-building experiences.
First, prior nation-building experiences can limit the repertoire of identity cleavages
available for retroactive use. For Christia, identity narratives are instrumental in nature
and retroactive in function. In Christia’s case studies of civil wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina
and Afghanistan, alliances are formed between warring parties that, based on their previous
use of identity narratives, should be bitter rivals.12 A warring party may choose to form an
alliance with another group because this will help achieve its war aims; and once this
decision has been made, a narrative of a shared identity or grievance is produced to
justify the decision. But the retroactive use of identity narratives is constrained by the avail-
able repertoire, which in turn might be shaped by prewar nation-building experiences.
Nation-building efforts attempt to lower the salience and dilute the political substance of
certain identities relative to the core constitutive story. In terms of identity narratives, prior
nation-building can decrease the number of identity narratives available to elites and also
imbue certain identity dimensions as having more resonance than others. The higher the
number of viable identity narratives, the more freedom elites have to side-switch. More-
over, certain identity narratives are no longer viable because, through the nation-building
process, those that used to identify with that identity have become assimilated into different
identities.
Christia acknowledges this variation in her empirics but does not theorise the source of
this variation. In the two civil wars cases in Afghanistan, a full gamut of identity repertoires
was available for elite use. But in the Bosnian Civil War (1992–1995), ascriptive cleavages
among the warring parties did not exist: the Croats, Muslims, and Serbs shared both race
and language (Christia, 2012, p. 170). The absence of viable ascriptive cleavages is
largely a result of past nation-building policies. The notion of a ‘shared racial identity’ is
constructed (Horowitz, 1985, p. 43; Ignatiev, 2009). Moreover, assimilating peoples into
a single language group is an explicit state-led nation-building policy (Darden, forthcom-
ing; Darden & Mylonas, 2016). Although defection to another alliance may make sense
from a relative power perspective, the narrative needed to justify such a decision may
not be sustainable. Successful indoctrination of a population prior to the war may eliminate
relevant cross-cutting cleavages on which elites build their identity narratives.
Second, prior nation-building can shape the resonance of identity cleavages chosen for
prospective use.13 Receptivity to identity appeals is not homogenous. Combatants are
not always receptive to the identity narratives used by elites. For a chosen identity narrative
to resonate, it must be internally consistent, have empirical support, and align with the target
population’s experiences (Smith, 2001). Resonance can also depend on the credibility of
‘frame articulators’ (Benford & Snow, 2000, p. 621). Resonance, in turn, influences how
likely the targeted population or entity is to accept the proposed conflict cleavage. Prior
nation-building experiences may generate an uneven distribution of identity resonance
that elites will take into account when deciding on identity narratives and conflict frames.
Although Christia (2012, p. 49) emphasises the retroactive use of identity narratives, she
suggests that they also serve a number of prospective purposes: they ‘communicate which
side their constituents should be on today,’ they ‘ensure and enhance compliance with the
new alliance or group allegiance,’ and they ‘act as a short-term mobilisation and commit-
ment device.’ If one pushes Christia’s approach to the role of identity narratives to its
logical extreme, we would expect that followers would remain loyal regardless the narrative
propagated by the elites. But we cannot take receptivity as a given. We suggest that it is
variable based on prior nation-building efforts. Crossing identity lines in civil war is not
always easy, despite how flexible Christia (2012, p. 48) makes alliances sound.
Pre-existing grievances or historically-shaped meanings embedded in a given identity
type can erect obstacles for fluid alliance switching and subgroup defections. In other
words, the stickiness of an identity, instrumentally chosen to justify an alliance, may in
fact be too sticky, such that it precludes future defection. Attesting to the stickiness of iden-
tities, Mampilly found that cadres can and do desert subgroups that decide to switch sides.
When the eastern Tamil commander Karuna Amman split from the Liberation Tigers of
Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to align with the Sinhalese government, many eastern Tamil cadres
viewed this as abandonment of Tamil racial solidarity and rejected appeals to identity
traits hypothetically shared with the ‘enemy’ (Mampilly, 2011, Chapter 4). Conversely,
if a government disseminates a potent and, in principle, inclusive constitutive story, then it

might be easier to switch to the government side. For decades, the Turkish government suc-
cessfully recruited Kurds against the Kurdish national insurgency. In this type of example,
government strength and the content of the national constitutive story made defection from
insurgent to government side more probable.
While Christia argues that warring group elites mobilise identity narratives to justify alli-
ances, McCauley suggests that elites manipulate conflict frames based on the mobilisational
differences that each frame evokes in the followers. So, while both Christia and McCauley
agree that elites have agency they profoundly disagree on the consequences of the propa-
gated identity type. For Christia, identity resonance has to do with group members follow-
ing elites; but for McCauley, identity resonance is about what political preferences a conflict
frame evokes in followers and thus the power resources made available to elites.14
For McCauley, location shapes the mobilisational differences between the identity types
examined. He focuses specifically on Africa, and on ethnicity and religion in particular.
McCauley’s intuitions rely on an experiment conducted in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana demon-
strating that individual preferences change conditional to whether they were primed with an
ethnic or a religious context. He then tests the plausibility of this argument with thorough
case studies from Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, and Sudan where he demonstrates that leaders’
strategic choices shape conflict frames. McCauley (2017, p. 105, 173) claims that his argu-
ment applies to identity conflicts beyond his three main case studies to all of sub-Saharan
Africa, but his argument about ethnicity and religion being land-based and rules-based
identities, respectively, is limited to the African context because ethnicity and religion
may function differently in another context. For example, he argues that in the Middle
East, ‘sacred sites unite religious rules with territory and nationalism’ and in Japan ‘ethni-
city, land, and national political identity converge’ (McCauley, 2017, p. 11).
McCauley justifies his African scope condition by referring to the socio-political insti-
tutions that are clearly the result of colonialism and its lasting effects on state- and
nation-building efforts on the continent. First, ethnicity and religion are strong and
salient identity cleavages because in Africa, states tend to be weak and therefore comple-
mented local membership in and association with ethnic and religious organisations.
Second, leaders of ethnic and religious groups were elevated to influential positions in
patronage systems, both by pre-colonial social structures and colonial administrative
tactics. Third, political parties in Africa tend to have weak issue-based platforms and
instead rely on patronage and community ties.
McCauley is cautious in the way he summarises his findings. He does not pit his mobi-
lisational differences argument against the coalition size explanations that align more with
Christia’s theory. Instead, since ethnicity and religion are overlapping cleavages in the
African context, and both have a history of conflict, this forces political entrepreneurs to
choose between the two frames without being able to significantly change their support
bases. In other words, size is held constant in order to isolate the causal effects of mobilis-
ation differences. From a nation-building perspective, however, we could venture further
and ask whether mobilisation differences are in fact a viable competing hypothesis about
elite decision-making processes. Nonetheless, McCauley exemplifies the virtues of using
prior nation-building experiences as a scope condition.
Identity cleavages vary in their resonance as prospective and retrospective tools for recruit-
ment of and cohesion within combat units as well as for plausibly justifying tactical alliance
decisions. Warring group leaders likely take this into account, even if they use identity in a
purely instrumental manner.15 Their freedom of choice is still circumscribed by the effects of
prewar nation-building. Nation-building can prune the repertoire of available cross-cutting
identity cleavages and assign different resonance to the identity cleavages remaining.
Conclusion: Making Sense of the Varying Role of Identity in Civil Wars

From the discussion above it is evident that civil war fractionalisation could be understood
as a function of prior nation-building policies that may have generated meaningful group
identities along which recruitment and targeting occurs. Prewar nation-building projects
can have a significant influence on the wartime dynamics that increase or decrease the like-
lihood of civil war fractionalisation. Thus, it makes sense that scholars studying countries
with different experiences of nation-building will come up with different assumptions and
explanations of civil war fractionalisation.16
It is not surprising that most theories explaining civil war dynamics have focused on
countries in the developing world. To an extent, this has to do with the fact that civil
wars are more likely in weak states with low levels of GDP (Fearon & Laitin, 2003).
These, however, are also often parts of the world where state-planned nation-building pol-
icies have either not been pursued or have been unsuccessful. These places, moreover, have
low levels of national integration, high levels of heterogeneity, and thus multiple identity
categories with the potential to become politically salient.
We applied this insight to important contributions of the third wave of civil war research.
In light of these observations, the explanatory power of Christia’s minimum winning
coalition argument is both impressive and unsurprising because in places with little prior
nation-building, one can expect less from ideational variables. Similarly, the distribution
of Staniland’s organisational types will systematically vary across the globe conditional
to each country’s experience with nation-building. And as McCauley himself recognises,
mobilisational differences per identity type varies based on historical processes. Once we
look at the universe of cases, conjoining binary and multiparty civil wars, it becomes
clear that a country’s prior experience with nation-building prior to a civil war is likely a
critical background condition.
Turning to the methodological implications of our review, the field would benefit from
a more systematic effort to specify scope conditions. For instance, according to Staniland,
his argument is applicable to cases where the insurgent organisation faces a strong state,
while Christia expects countries with a strong state apparatus to experience binary civil
wars and thus considers such cases to be beyond the scope of her theory. And yet
three of Staniland’s six cases are included in Christia’s dataset: Kashmir, Sri Lanka,
and Afghanistan. Should we conclude then that state strength is an ambiguous scope con-
dition? There should be a conscious effort to delineate the universe of cases where an
argument is applicable.
We are under no illusion that prior nation-building is a master variable that explains all
civil war processes. To be sure, the success of nation-building projects varies along a con-
tinuum; and the ruling elites of a state could implement different nation-building policies at
the same time, depending on the targeted population (Mylonas, 2012). Thus, the relation-
ship between prior nation-building and civil war processes should not be understood as a
linear causal relationship.
Instead, we suggest that scholars should take nation-building into account as an impor-
tant antecedent variable. For example, in Afghanistan, the Taliban has maintained a rather
unified and cohesive front despite significant challenges. Other warring groups in Afghani-
stan have not enjoyed the same track record. This might be explained by Staniland’s social-
institutional theory or Christia’s relative power theory, or by another theory not reviewed
here. Although nation-building cannot explain the Taliban’s success, the type of prior
nation-building experience may still be important for establishing the limits of their the-
ories’ generalisability.
Integrating a nation-building perspective would allow a more cumulative understanding
of the processes discussed in these books. Moreover, prior nation-building experiences help
us make sense of the way fractionalisation in civil wars is geographically distributed across
regions of the globe. Since civil war devolves authority to more basic social relations
(Kissane, 2016), we cannot ignore the vestigial effects of national identities, however
unsuccessful they may be as state projects. In fact, the failure of nation-building projects
is implicit in the onset of a civil war. And the termination of a civil war is the first wary
step toward renewed nation-building, whatever form it might take. All in all, the virtue
of considering identity through a nation-building perspective is not its predictive power,
but the logical intuitions that can add greater nuance to theory building efforts in the
study of civil wars.
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 Insti-
tute 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 deter-
minative 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 dis-
count 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 sub-
suming group distinctions within a cohesive national identity. After all, ranked ethnic group systems (Hor-
owitz, 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) pro-
posed 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 fol-
lowers (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 his-
tories. There may be cases where nation-building is incomplete because greater ethnic diversity under-
mines 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).
ORCID
Harris Mylonas http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0506-644X
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Ethnopolitics, 2022

Vol. 21, No. 1, 1–21, https://doi.org/10.1080/17449057.2019.1684095

Nation-Building and the Role of Identity

KENDRICK KUO & HARRIS MYLONAS

© 2019 The Editor of Ethnopolitics

The Role of Identity in Civil War Research

The Link Between Nation-Building and Civil War Fractionalisation

Warring Group Formation and Cohesion

insurgent organisations in wartime, whereas Christia treats warring groups as a fusion of

if a government disseminates a potent and, in principle, inclusive constitutive story, then it

Conclusion: Making Sense of the Varying Role of Identity in Civil Wars

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

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