Harris Mylonas

When Do Votes Count? Regime Type, Electoral Conduct, and Political Competition in Africa

The effects of electoral systems have been tested recently in Africa, raising several questions: Are the systematic effects of electoral rules the same across regime types? Does the conduct of elections affect the process of strategic coordination between voters and parties? The literature to date has not considered these issues and also analyzes elections in settings where a crucial set of its assumptions are clearly violated. The authors argue that the mechanism of strategic coordination only operates in democracies that hold free and fair elections, and they exhibit the ways it is violated outside of this domain. They compile a new data set on sub-Saharan African elections and show that the interaction of electoral rules and ethnopolitical cleavages predicts the number of parties only in democratic settings, failing to produce substantive effects in nondemocratic ones.

The microfoundations of diaspora politics: unpacking the state and disaggregating the diaspora

ABSTRACT Recognising the need to unpack the ‘state’ and problematise the term ‘diaspora’, in this special issue we examine the various actors within (and beyond) the state that participate in the design and implementation of diaspora policies, as well as the mechanisms through which diasporas are constructed by governments, political parties, diaspora entrepreneurs, or international organisations. Extant theories are often hard-pressed to capture the empirical variation and often end up identifying ‘exceptions’. We theorise these ‘exceptions’ through three interrelated conceptual moves: First, we focus on understudied aspects of the relationships between states as well as organised non-state actors and their citizens or co-ethnics abroad (or at home – in cases of return migration). Second, we examine dyads of origin states and specific diasporic communities differentiated by time of emigration, place of residence, socio-economic status, migratory status, generation, or skills. Third, we consider migration in its multiple spatial and temporal phases (emigration, immigration, transit, return) and how they intersect to constitute diasporic identities and policies. These conceptual moves contribute to comparative research in the field and allow us to identify the mechanisms connecting structural variables with specific policies by states (and other actors) as well as responses by the relevant diasporic communities.

Threats to Territorial Integrity, National Mass Schooling, and Linguistic Commonality:

Why are some countries more linguistically homogeneous than others? We posit that the international environment in which a state develops partially determines the extent of its linguistic commonality and national cohesion. Specifically, the presence of an external threat of territorial conquest or externally supported secession leads governing elites to have stronger incentives to pursue nation-building strategies to generate national cohesion, often leading to the cultivation of a common national language through mass schooling. Comparing cases with similar levels of initial linguistic heterogeneity, state capacity, and development, but in different international environments, we find that states that did not face external threats to their territorial integrity were more likely to outsource education and other tools for constructing identity to missionaries or other groups, or not to invest in assimilation at all, leading to higher ethnic heterogeneity. States developing in high threat environments were more likely to invest in nation-building strategies to homogenize their populations.

Which Land Is Our Land? Domestic Politics and Change in the Territorial Claims of Stateless Nationalist Movements

Why do stateless nationalist movements change the area they see as appropriately constituting the nation-state they aspire to establish? This article draws a number of hypotheses from the literature on nationalism and state formation and compares the predictions of each about the timing, direction, and process of change to the empirical record in two stateless national movements in the post-Ottoman space: Fatah and the Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. Based on this investigation, the article argues that shifts in the areas stateless nationalist movements seek as their nation-states occur as a byproduct of the politically competitive domestic environment in which these movements are embedded. As nationalist movements engage in the competition for mundane power and survival, their leaders may alter their rhetoric about the extent of the desired national state to meet immediate political challenges that are often only loosely related to territorial issues. If these, initially tactical, rhetorical modulations successfully resolve the short-term challenges that spurred their adoption, they can become institutionalized as comprising the new territorial scope of the desired national state.

The Promethean Dilemma: Third-party State-building in Occupied Territories

IntroductionContemporary occupying powers seeking to build states on foreign soil are faced with afundamental dilemma: How can they transfer coercive and organizational capacity tothe local population without such capabilities being used to undermine the occupiers’efforts to establish stable governance of the territory? Current thinking holds that thebest way to manage the transition is to do it quickly, either by recruiting indigenousarmy and police units as rapidly as possible or by co-opting pre-existing groups of fightersto make them serve the state. If the occupier can build roads, provide public services, andexpand the army and the police, so the thinking currently goes, he will achieve the necess-ary ‘buy-in’ from the local population that will allow him to pack up his things and gohome, leaving a stable new order in his stead. When it comes to putting guns in thehands of the indigenous population, sooner is better.The modern history of occupation and imperial rule provides more than a cautionaryfootnote to this current wisdom on how to pursue state-building efforts on foreign soil.We suggest that effective state-building requires effective nation-building. It rests on asuccessful effort to create social cohesion, loyalty and legitimacy of rule. Our primaryfinding can be summarized simply in two points. First, effective state-building demandsthat efforts to establish a loyal citizenry precede the transfer of coercive capabilities tothe subject population. An increase in the raw numbers of people who are trained in thearts and implements of force does little, on its own, to build the capacity of the state orto increase order. Nation-building must come first. If efforts to build coercive capacityprecede efforts to build loyalty and legitimacy, the result is more likely to be a futurecivil war than a stable governing state. Second, and more sobering, we argue thatEthnopolitics2011, 1–9, iFirst article

Methodological challenges in the study of stateless nationalist territorial claims

ABSTRACT Methodological challenges in the study of stateless nationalist territorial claims. Territory, Politics, Governance. The territory claimed by stateless nationalist movements can change over time. Following a review of prominent explanations, this article addresses some of the more general methodological challenges involved in studying change in the territorial claims of stateless nationalist movements. It draws attention to the analytical distinction between the origin of territorial claims and their consequent changes. Building on this distinction, it also demonstrates the advantages of using a multidimensional understanding of change in territorial claims focusing on its timing, direction, and process. Then it turns to a discussion highlighting the tradeoffs in the choice of the unit of analysis as well as common problems in case selection, i.e., unjustifiable asynchronous comparisons and anachronism. The article concludes by laying out a roadmap for future research in this area.

Foreign policy priorities and ethnic return migration policies: group-level variation in Greece and Serbia

ABSTRACT Why do ethnoculturally defined states pursue favourable policies to integrate some returnees from their historical diasporas while neglecting or excluding others? We study this question by looking at members of two historical diasporas that, in the 1990s, returned to their respective ethnic homelands, Greece and Serbia, but were not treated uniformly by their respective governments. Utilising a wide range of primary sources, we consider evidence for a number of plausible explanations for such policy variation, including the economic profile of an ethnic returnee group, its status in internal ethnic hierarchies, its lobbying power, and dynamics of party politics. We find, instead, that the observed variation is best explained by the role that each particular group played in the ruling elites’ ex ante foreign policy objectives. Elites discouraged the repatriation of co-ethnics from parts of the world they still had claims over, by pursuing unfavourable repatriation policies. Conversely, absent a revisionist claim, states adopted favourable repatriation policies to encourage their repatriation and facilitate their integration upon return. Methodologically, the article illustrates the importance of focused comparisons across dyads of states and particular sub-diaspora groups.

Interstate Relations, Perceptions, and Power Balance: Explaining China’s Policies Toward Ethnic Groups, 1949–1965

Why do multi-ethnic states treat various ethnic groups differently? How do ethnic groups respond to these state policies? We argue that interstate relations and ethnic group perceptions about the relative strength of competing states are important—but neglected—factors in accounting for the variation in state-ethnic group relations. In particular, whether an ethnic group is perceived as having an external patron matters a great deal for the host states treatment of the group. If the external patron of the ethnic group is an enemy of the host state, then repression is likely. If it is an ally, then accommodation ensues. Given the existence of an external patron, an ethnic groups response to a host states policies depends on the perceptions about the relative strength of the external patron vis-à-vis the host state and whether the support is originating from an enemy or an ally of the host state. We present five configurations and illustrate our theoretical framework on the eighteen largest ethnic groups in China from 1949 to 1965, tracing the Chinese governments policies toward these groups, and examine how each group responded to these various nation-building policies.

Hierarchy, Sovereignty, and Adaptation in the Eastern Mediterranean

Though not indigenous to the Eastern Mediterranean, the national state model has had enormous impact in shaping the trajectory of political and social change within the region (Tilly 1992). Political entrepreneurs in this region have responded to the emergence of national states in a number of ways and experimented with a plethora of understandings of nationhood and statehood. They have tried to sequence state-building, nation-building, and territorializing policies in ways that at once paralleled and diverged from their counterparts in Western Europe (Kitromilides 1989; Mylonas 2013). Novel institutional designs for sovereignty continue to appear to this day. Some of these designs, such as the emergence of the Islamic State, an unbounded but still territorial de facto state, were seen as direct challenges and dangers to the international system. Others, such as the development of a vast channel of refugees and migrants connecting the region with the capital centers of EU member states, have been even more difficult to assess.

The roots of ethnic cleansing in Europe

Zeynep Bulutgil has written an important book on the roots of ethnic cleansing in Europe. Bulutgil invites us to read twentieth-century European history not just from the perspective of ethnicity b...