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Territorial debates complicate the politics of the affected regions, as parties decide whether to compete on a territorial dimension alongside other longstanding important issues. Yet, empirical evidence is scarce regarding how much voters politically weigh territorial issues against others. We theorize that in contexts when such issues are salient, they have a greater weight relative to others due to their identity-oriented nature. We present evidence from conjoint experiments from three European regions with active territorial debates: Catalonia, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. We find that territorial preferences matter more than others for candidate choice, as the reward (punishment) of congruent (incongruent) candidates is greater, and individuals are less willing to trade off on this issue. Our results have comparative implications for political competition in multidimensional spaces.

Territorial debates complicate the politics of the affected regions, as parties decide whether to compete on a territorial dimension alongside other longstanding important issues. Yet, empirical evidence is scarce regarding how much voters politically weigh territorial issues against others. We theorize that in contexts when such issues are salient, they have a greater weight relative to others due to their identity-oriented nature. We present evidence from conjoint experiments from three European regions with active territorial debates: Catalonia, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. We find that territorial preferences matter more than others for candidate choice, as the reward (punishment) of congruent (incongruent) candidates is greater, and individuals are less willing to trade off on this issue. Our results have comparative implications for political competition in multidimensional spaces.

How do episodes of intergroup violence affect political opinions toward outgroup members? Recent studies offer divergent answers. Some suggest violence deepens antagonism and reduces support for compromise, while others contend it encourages moderation and concessions to prevent further conflict. We argue that violence can fuel both hostility toward the outgroup and acceptance of outgroup objectives and provide evidence from a unique survey of 1,380 respondents implemented by the authors in greater Khartoum in Sudan in 2010 and 2011. We find that Northerners who experienced rioting by Southerners in Khartoum in 2005 were more likely to support Southern independence but less likely to support citizenship for Southerners remaining in the North. In combination, these results suggest that political violence hardens negative intergroup attitudes and makes individuals willing to concede separation to avoid living alongside outgroup members.

Quantitative scholarship on civil wars has long debated whether ethnic diversity breeds armed conflict. We go beyond this debate and show that highly diverse societies are not more conflict prone. Rather, states characterized by certain ethnopolitical configurations of power are more likely to experience violent conflict. First, armed rebellions are more likely to challenge states that exclude large portions of the population on the basis of ethnic background. Second, when a large number of competing elites share power in a segmented state, the risk of violent infighting increases. Third, incohesive states with a short history of direct rule are more likely to experience secessionist conflicts. We test these hypotheses for all independent states since 1945 using the new Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) data set. Cross-national analysis demonstrates that ethnic politics is as powerful and robust in predicting civil wars as is a country's level of economic development. Using multinomial logit regression, we show that rebellion, infighting, and secession result from high degrees of exclusion, segmentation, and incohesion, respectively. More diverse states, on the other hand, are not more likely to suffer from violent conflict.

Over the past three decades, research in urban politics or increasingly urban governance reveals a landscape powerfully reflecting what might now be defined as a post-political consensus. Following a waning of the community power, urban managerialist and collective consumption debates, this 'new urban politics' has appeared conspicuously absorbed with analysing a purported consensus around economic growth alongside a proliferation of entrepreneurially oriented governing regimes. More recent contributions, acknowledging the role of the state and governmentalities of criminal justice, uncover how downtown renaissance is inscribed through significant land privatisations and associated institutionalised expressions like Business Improvement Districts and other 'primary definers' of 'public benefit': all choreographed around an implicit consensus to 'police' the circumspect city, while presenting as ultra-politics anything that might disturb the strict ethics of consumerist citizenship. Beyond downtown, a range of shadow governments, secessionary place-makings and privatisms are remaking the political landscape of post-suburbia.It is contended that the cumulative effect of such metropolitan splintering may well be overextending our established interpretations of urban landscapes and city politics, prompting non-trivial questions about the precise manner in which political representation, democracy and substantive citizenship are being negotiated across metropolitan regions, from downtown streetscape to suburban doorstep. This paper suggests that recent theorisations on post-democracy and the post-political may help to decode the contemporary landscape of urban politics beyond governance, perhaps in turn facilitating a better investigation of crucial questions over distributional justice and metropolitan integrity.

Conflicting theories and mixed empirical results exist on the relationship between ethnic diversity and trust. This article argues that these mixed empirical results might be driven by contextual conditions. We conjecture that political competition could strengthen ethnic saliency and, in turn, salient ethnic identities can activate or intensify in-group trust and depress trust in members of other ethnic groups. We test this conjecture using the move toward secession in Catalonia, Spain. We conduct trust experiments across ethnic lines in Catalonia before and during the secessionist process. After three years of proindependence mobilization in Catalonia, one of the ethnic groups, Spanish speakers living in Catalonia, has indeed increased its in-group trust. This result is robust after a set of individual-level variables are controlled for, but no equivalent result is found in a comparable region, the Basque Country.

The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) had two notable consequences. The first is the complex institutional structure, and the second is the war-induced displacement. The article’s exclusive emphasis is on the latter consequence. The violent ethnic homogenization and territorialization between 1992 and 1995 permanently altered and severely damaged the ethnic composition of the country. Even though the non-Serbs were forcibly displaced and then returned voluntarily to their home of origin, the returnees are confronted with the secessionist threat and the continuous challenge of life in Republika Srpska (RS). The article aims to address the continuing challenges faced by Bosniak returnees in the RS, with particular emphasis on the connections between returnee experiences and the unresolved threat of secession. To explore the social, political, and economic challenges faced by returnees and the impact of increasing separatist agitation and tendencies in the RS on Bosniak returnees, a field study was carried out in six municipalities located in East Bosnia: Zvornik, Bratunac, Vlasenica, Milići, Srebrenica, and Višegrad.

Abstract This article attempts to answer the question: is Ethiopian federalism sustainable? Once deemed a thought vanguard of building Ethiopia as a new 'multi-national' state, existing philosophical and institutional design limitations are increasingly making its sustainability problematic amidst the revival of its rival alternatives-unitarism and secessionism. This article argues for re-inventing the system in the spirit of loose federalism, ensuring its continued relevance to the fast changing political climate in Ethiopia. To this end, it calls for a robust revisit, re-negotiation and redesign of i) distribution of self-rule and shared rule powers, ii) vertical and horizontal inter-governmental relations, and iii) House of Federation of the system. A central challenge is how to secure sufficient political trust between the federal and regional governments and among the regional governments of the federation. This requires a 'workable platform and rules of the game' for running a smooth grand elite bargaining process.

In Wars of Law , Tanisha M. Fazal assesses the unintended consequences of the proliferation of the laws of war for the commencement, conduct, and conclusion of wars over the course of the past one hundred fifty years. Fazal outlines three main arguments: early laws of war favored belligerents, but more recent additions have constrained them; this shift may be attributable to a growing divide between lawmakers and those who must comply with international humanitarian law; and lawmakers have been consistently inattentive to how rebel groups might receive these laws. By using the laws of war strategically, Fazal suggests, belligerents in both interstate and civil wars relate those laws to their big-picture goals. Why have states stopped issuing formal declarations of war? Why have states stopped concluding formal peace treaties? Why are civil wars especially likely to end in peace treaties today? In addressing such questions, Fazal provides a lively and intriguing account of the implications of the laws of war.

State emergence is an essential dynamic of the international system, yet international relations scholars pay it little attention. Their oversight is all the more unfortunate because international politics ultimately determine which aspiring system members will succeed in becoming new states. Existing models of state emergence rely exclusively on internal or domestic-level explanations. However, the international system is inherently social; therefore any aspiring state's membership also depends on the acceptance of its peers. I present a novel, international-level model of state birth that suggests state leaders should use decisions regarding new members strategically to advance their own interests, not passively abide by domestic factors. I test this argument using a new data set on secessionism and Great Power recognition (1931–2000). I find that external politics have important, underappreciated effects on state emergence. Furthermore, acknowledging the politics of recognition's centrality to state birth alters our understanding of civil conflict dynamics and conflict resolution and suggests important implications for system-wide stability.