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9 - The Strategic Logic of Territorial Power Sharing, Secession and Civil War

from Part II - Analyzing the Effect of Power Sharing on CivilWar

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2022

Lars-Erik Cederman
Affiliation:
ETH Zurich University
Simon Hug
Affiliation:
University of Geneva
Julian Wucherpfennig
Affiliation:
Hertie School, Berlin
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Summary

Focusing on regional autonomy arrangements, this chapter investigates, to what extent, and in what form, territorial power sharing mitigates civil conflict (see Master Hypothesis 1b). Our point of departure is again our past research indicating that exclusion of ethnic groups increases the risk of internal conflict. As argued in Chapter 3, however, such results do not automatically imply that regional inclusiveness will guarantee peace, especially if the relationship between an excluded group and the incumbent government has already seen violence. Based on a global sample of ethnic groups as provided by the Ethnic Power Relations dataset, here we show that, in such situations and on its own, regional autonomy is likely to be ``too little, too late.'' It is too little because only full inclusion through governmental power sharing reduces conflict propensity significantly (see Master Hypothesis 5); and it is too late since regional autonomy could be effective, but only if offered in a timely, preventive fashion before group-government relations turn violent (see Master Hypothesis 3). Accounting for endogeneity, we also instrument for autonomy in postcolonial states by exploiting that French, as opposed to British, colonial rule rarely relied on decentralized governance. This identification strategy suggests that naïve analysis tends to underestimate the pacifying influence of decentralization.

Type
Chapter
Information
Sharing Power, Securing Peace?
Ethnic Inclusion and Civil War
, pp. 174 - 206
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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