Redemption through Rebellion: Border Change, Lost Unity, and Nationalist Conflict
Journal: American Journal of Political Science
Year: 2021

Abstract Are past border changes responsible for today's civil wars? Departing from conventional, state‐centric research designs, this article examines this question by focusing on “aggregate” ethnic groups, which are defined independently of state borders. Introducing a new index of “territorial fractionalization” that measures how fragmented such groups are across states, we postulate that higher fragmentation is linked to a greater risk of civil conflict. Furthermore, we expect that groups th