How common is ethnic defection during civil war? This study from Yale University examines the relationship between ethnic identity and civil war and points to instances of fluidity in the expression of ethnic identities within civil war. It argues that ethnic defection is best predicted by the extent of territorial control exercised by the main political actors and the level of prior insurgent violence. Ethnic defection is a function of the resources available to political actors. It is important therefore to analyse the internal dynamics of civil wars.
Recent research on civil wars, particularly in the field of international relations, has tended to treat ethnic groups as unitary actors, and ethnic identities as given ex ante, automatically salient, fixed during the conflict, and predictive of individual political behavior. In their simplest formulation, these assumptions boil down to the claim that during civil wars, individuals will tend to act in support of organisations claiming to represent their ethnic identity, to the extent that individuals and organisations can be conflated into a single actor: the ethnic group.
However, it should not be assumed that strategic interaction, between rival actors and between these actors and the population, plays little if any role in the evolution of the war or that once a war is on, nothing changes in terms of mass-level preferences.
- Many individuals enter the war long after it has started, driven by incentives and constraints that are by-products of the war and result from innovative and adaptive strategies devised by the rival actors in the course of the war.
- Neither organisations nor preferences are fixed – change is synonymous with war.
- Defection from rebel organisations making ethnic claims is both possible and more common than widely thought.
- Once the war begins, previously unavailable incentives appear, leading people to collaborate with organisations hostile to the ethnic group with whom they are associated. Revenge is a strong incentive for defection.
- Ethnic defection can be primarily demand driven – rather than emerging as a spontaneous individual process, it is generated by the organisational demand for collaborators.
- This type of demand requires the existence of an organisation capable of implementing such a complex operation.
Irregular war is a social process that places a premium on territorial control. Control, largely based on the use of military resources, can potentially generate collaboration, irrespective of initially adverse preferences. These findings have several important implications for current research on civil wars.
- Treating ethnic groups as unitary actors, whose leaders and members all act homogeneously, can be problematic.
- Organisations, as opposed to groups, are the appropriate unit of analysis and their relation to underlying populations must be the object of systematic theoretical and empirical investigation as opposed to mere assumption.
- It shouldn’t be assumed that the factors used to predict civil war outcomes, such as their duration or termination, are independent of the war itself.
- Individuals do not necessarily enter a civil war with a set of goals or grievances that remain unchanged during the war.
- It is important to focus on the identity consequences of civil war, rather than the more common emphasis on identities as a cause of civil war.
