Erin K. Jenne

The Paradox of Ethnic Partition: Lessons from de facto Partition in Bosnia and Kosovo

This article argues that ethnic partition, rather than resolving ethnic security dilemmas endemic to ethnic civil wars, has the paradoxical effect of reproducing wartime ethnic cleavages in the post-war period. This is because segregating combatant groups into militarily defensible self-governing territories tends to undermine the central government, ensures successive electoral victories of ultra-nationalists, and puts state resources in the hands of ethnic militia leaders who have incentives to perpetuate the conflict. This argument is illustrated in the cases of post-war Bosnia and Kosovo, which show that the unwillingness of the international community to implement the integrationist elements of the peace arrangements has amplified the challenge of rebuilding peaceful state societies today.

Can Outsiders Help

Abstract: Hungary’s ‘constitutional revolution’ presents the most significant case of democratic backsliding in the European Union to date. The illiberal constitution, introduced by the Orbán government and protected by a host of new appointees, undermines the independence of various political institutions and guarantees virtually unlimited powers for the ruling party. But it also challenges the core values of the European Union, while underscoring significant limitations of supranational community in regulating the more troublesome behavior of its member states. In this article, we identify the key weaknesses of the main domestic and international actors in resisting Orbá’s constitutional revolution and show why a Hungarian ‘colored revolution’ is most likely not in the cards. In a final section, we highlight some promising developments within Hungarian civil society, which deserve direct and indirect support from the international community.

Dilemmas of Divorce: How Secessionist Identities Cut Both Ways

Secessionist groups, if they are to achieve their goal of independence, require both domestic and international support, although neither is easy to obtain. One strategy that such groups may pursue is the use of their identity to gain support both at home and abroad. What causes leaders of a secessionist movement to focus on one identity over another and why do these identities change over time? How much flexibility do elites have in making these choices? This article explores the ways in which latent identities simultaneously constrain and empower secessionist groups in achieving their political ambitions. We argue that the leaders of such groups engage in “identity layering” to achieve statehood for their region. Two cases, the Eritrean and Macedonian secessionist movements, are used to illustrate both the logic of identity layering and the dilemmas it entails. The central argument is that the configuration of constraints in each case largely determines the identities that are selected and layered onto the group in question. The use of such identities may also generate resistance—from within the secessionist entity or from outside—which in turn creates incentives for identity change. This analysis shows, first, that territorial identities (as opposed to ethnic or ideological ones) tend to serve as the groups primary mobilizational base, and second, that domestic imperatives weigh more heavily than international pressures in determining the success of these choices.

Barriers to Reintegration after Ethnic Civil Wars: Lessons from Minority Returns and Restitution in the Balkans

This article evaluates the record of minority return in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo to assess the viability of ethnic reintegration in the wake of protracted sectarian violence. Comparative analysis reveals that the logic of post-war ethnic spoils has greatly limited the success of such programmes. What success has been achieved is largely due to third party efforts to disrupt patronage networks and challenge post-war authorities. I conclude that these factors are more significant barriers to reintegration than inexorable ethnic hatreds and fears derived from memories of war. Because such barriers are more readily overcome than entrenched grassroots hostilities, there may be more hope for reintegration than previously thought. However, the systematic failure of the international community to protect and assist prospective minority returnees suggests that continued scepticism of post-war reintegration is in order.

Situational Nationalism: Nation-building in the Balkans, Subversive Institutions and the Montenegrin Paradox

Abstract The history of Montenegrin nation-building goes against the expectations of many institutionalist theories of nationalism, which generally hold that national institutions increase collective sentiments of national identity. Although during the period of socialist Yugoslavia, Montenegro had an institutional endowment similar to that of other republics—including a constitution, parliament, government, flag, republican borders, and academy of arts and sciences—the proportion of self-identified Montenegrins actually declined from 91% at the start of the socialist period to 44.5% in the most recent census. This occurred despite the fact that Yugoslav elites built up Montenegros national institutions over these decades; it also runs against the expectations of many institutionalist theories of nationalism that predict constant—or even heightened—national consciousness as a groups institutional endowment increases. Municipal-level census data in Montenegro are examined over time to show that neither national institutions nor elite efforts to mobilize upon them succeeded in generating a robust Montenegrin identity. The evidence here provides preliminary support for a theory of ‘situational nationalism’, according to which the fate of national projects depends on the wider identity environment. Despite elite efforts to build nations along certain lines, people choose their identities in the context of an ever-changing field of political and identity conflicts at the international and domestic levels in a fluctuating ‘marketplace of ideas’. It is concluded that identity conflicts in the wider neighborhood place significant constraints on the success of any given nation-building project.

Has the Tea Party Era Radicalized the Republican Party? Evidence from Text Analysis of the 2008 and 2012 Republican Primary Debates

Much ink has been spilled to describe the emergence and likely influence of the Tea Party on the American political landscape. Pundits and journalists declared that the emergence of the Tea Party movement pushed the Republican Party to a more extreme ideological position, which is generally anti-Washington. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed the ideological positions taken by candidates in the 2008 and 2012 pre-Iowa caucus Republican presidential-primary debates. To establish the positions, we used the debate transcripts and a text-analytic technique that placed the candidates on a single dimension. Findings show that, overall, the 2012 candidates moved closer to an anti-Washington ideology—associated with the Tea Party movement—and away from the more traditional social conservative Republican ideology, which was more salient in the 2008 debates. Both Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, the two candidates who ran in both elections, shifted significantly in the ideological direction associated with the Tea Party.

When Will We Part with Partition Theory? Flawed Premises and Improbable Longevity of the Theory of Ethnic Partition

This paper argues that the theory of ethnic partition, first formally articulated in the early 1990s, is plagued by flawed premises and weak empirical support. Partition theory is based on the assumption that ethnic civil wars create such intense fears and insecurities at the sub-state level that the warring sides will no longer be able to coexist in a common society. Owing to the intractable nature of this so-called ethnic security dilemma, the combatant groups will only agree to disarm once they are safely separated into defensible state-like territories. This paper argues that the security dilemma is a poor heuristic for explaining the dynamics of protracted sectarian conflicts. As a result, partition theorists underestimate the potential for ethnic reintegration, offer political cover for ethnic cleansers, and prescribe more extreme solutions to ethnic war than are actually warranted. Having demonstrated the flawed assumptions upon which partition theory is based, the paper concludes by outlining possible reasons for the theorys persistence despite its faulty underpinnings.

Rhetoric of civil conflict management: United Nations Security Council debates over the Syrian civil war

This paper introduces a spatial model of civil conflict management rhetoric to explore how the emerging norm of responsibility to protect shapes major power rhetorical responses to civil war. Using framing theory, we argue that responsibility to protect functions like a prescriptive norm, such that representing a conflict as one of (1) human rights violations (problem definition), implies rhetorical support for (2) coercive outside intervention (solution identification). These dimensions reflect the problem-solution form of a prescriptive norm. Using dictionary scaling with a dynamic model, we analyze the positions of UN Security Council members in debates over the Syrian Civil War separately for each dimension. We find that the permanent members who emphasized human rights violations also used intervention rhetoric (UK, France, and the US), and those who did not used non-intervention rhetoric (Russia and China). We conclude that, while not a fully consolidated norm, responsibility to protect appears to have structured major power rhetorical responses to the Syrian Civil War.

Above, Below and Beyond the State: New Directions in Ethnic Conflict Studies

Abstract This essay argues that the research on ethnic conflict has for too long suffered from significant disciplinary divides among sociologists, historians, political scientists, anthropologists, geologists, and economists—these divides bring attention to underemphasized factors, but can also foster inattention to the influence of factors that fall outside of the specific purview of one’s field. Even within political science, there is a divide between comparativists’ focus on state-level factors and international relations scholars’ work on transnational dimensions. The past two decades have seen important cross-fertilization due to numerous projects that seek to bridge methodological and disciplinary boundaries that hamper fuller understanding of the causes and solutions of ethnic conflict. Unfortunately, there remains a strong statist bias in the field, which is, however, being challenged by a newer generation of scholars who are focusing on conflict processes above, below, and beyond the state.

The Low Odds of Successful Third-party Nation-building

In The Promethean Dilemma, Mylonas and Darden address the central dilemma facing third-party occupiers, the so-called Promethean dilemma. In Greek mythology, Prometheus was a Titan punished by the Gods for giving the gift of fire (civilization) to humankind; for his crime, an eagle ate out his liver every day, only to have it regenerate every night. In the context of state-building, the Promethean dilemma refers to the problem of how to give the gift of stability to citizens of weak or fractured states without ‘unintentionally training an insurgency or arming the combatants of a future civil war’. The problem is that the would-be liberators find their own guns turned against them and are thus punished ‘by the Gods’ for trying to stabilize the country they recently liberated. The authors proceed to outline the nature of this dilemma in the hope of resolving it. Previous work on state-building has emphasized that occupations are unlikely to succeed unless they are lengthy. At the same time, however, third-party interveners are likely to attract a fierce resistance unless the occupation itself is fast and surgical (Edelstein, 2004). To reduce the costs and risks of an extended intervention, third parties therefore have strong incentives to build up a coercive capacity quickly so they can leave before a resistance has a chance to mobilize. The problem is that turning over power to the locals without first winning their trust means that this firepower can easily be turned against the intervener or against one another—yielding a violent rebellion or civil war. The authors cite the example of Germany during World War II, which expanded far beyond its ability to tame occupied territories; this eventually led to its undoing. Likewise, Napoleonic France had insufficient forces for governing its freshly conquered territories across Europe. Today, the USA and its allies face this very problem in their occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, where Ethnopolitics, Vol. 11, No. 1, 105–108, March 2012