CONFLICT STUDIES 2026
Class 1: Introduction & definition of the field of study
1. The world today: developments 2. Trends in conflict
The world is experiencing several interconnected trends that 1. Internationalisation
shape contemporary conflict: Almost no conflict is purely internal: there is nearly always
1. Increase in militarisation: rising defence budgets, more another country involved.
competition = Different conflict logics overlap & interfere w each other.
2. New forms of political rule: democracy replaced by Examples:
authoritarianism & populism = changes how conflicts • Mali: multiple armed groups (JNIM/al-Qaeda, ISIS, Tuareg)
emerge and are managed + Mali's army supported by Wagner Group. Ukraine
3. N of conflicts is rising: new players, more types of armed supported Tuareg with drones = Tuareg killed ~60% of
groups, private military companies (PMCs) Wagner forces in one attack.
—> Also N of casualties is rising (especially in civil wars). • Libya: civil war led to 2 competing gov's (one UN-
4. More territories controlled by non-state armed groups recognised, one not). Involved: UAE, TUR, ITA, Qatar, etc.
5. Revolution in communication: easier to spread fake news, • Sudan: similar fragmentation with INT involvement.
harder to understand what really happens in conflict zones
6. Geographic shift: conflicts were concentrated in the Global 2 Subcontracting Security
South, but now also in EUR again (e.g. UKR) = States increasingly outsource security to PMCs instead of
—> some conflict maps exclude cases like Mexico (cartels relying on UN peacekeeping.
not classified as "conflict"). And the rise of those - Wagner Group = Russian foreign policy tool
conflicts is also unprecedented. - Sadat = Turkish equivalent of Wagner
- Blackwater = US equivalent, supported in Iraq for ex.
3. CS as a field of research
= Peace & conflict studies is Key difference from classic mercenaries:
- a transformative, interdisciplinary field = PMCs are not just profit-driven, they also serve geopolitical
- analytical, nonviolent in orientation, uses both theoretical and interests of their home states
a-theoretical methods, and is global in scope. (e.g. Wagner = instrument of Russian foreign policy).
- offers nonviolent strategies to address conflict at all levels => Raises serious issues of accountability and legitimacy.
(micro, meso, macro, mega).
3. Fragmented Security Landscapes
Core aim = twofold: = Conflict zones are highly fragmented: many armed groups,
1. Understand what is going on in conflicts (causes & unclear zones of control
consequences) • Challenges: where to start peace efforts? When does a
2. Transform violence into non-violence (peacebuilding) group "control" an area?
Conflict studies is often called "a child of its time": 4. Communication & Technology
= didn't emerge from abstract theorising but as a direct response - Drones: UKR war = biggest push for drone warfare (even
to world events. It is multidisciplinary, drawing from polsci, soc, gamers recruited to operate drones) bc they are cheap, easy
psychology, law, history, … to use and hard to defend against.
- Fake news: distorts understanding of conflict zones, makes
Since the 2000s, there has been an exponential growth in reliable info harder to get
researchers, practitioners, and research centres.
But: intellectual roots go back much further: The crucial shift But it was the World Wars that turned this thinking into a
in the early 20th movement.
century: from = The scale of killing in WWI triggered a wave of pacifism
philosophical and anti-war organisations, all aiming to generate anti-
reflection on war sentiment and encourage peaceful INT relations.
peace to actually - Ishiyama & Breuning: the horror of WWI led to new efforts to
making rules understand, prevent, and eliminate war
about war. - Quincy Wright: A Study of War (1942) = 15-year interdisciplinary
research project on causes of war
- Dada art movement (1915-1923) = anti-war cultural response
- INT Fellowship of Reconciliation (est. 1919) = religious NGO
promoting nonviolence
The field truly took shape during the Cold War, when the
nuclear threat dominated everything. After WWII, these sentiments crystallised into a formal field.
- New conflicts kept emerging (Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, - INT Relations was founded as a discipline in 1919 (Univ.
decolonisation), and scholars studied violent conflict on three College of Wales, Carnegie Endowment for INT Peace).
levels: domestic, interstate & intrastate. + Social psychologists and natural scientists joined
—> A key belief of this era: science could prevent war. —> The early focus was on arms races, revolutions, wars,
- Singer argued that if scientific study of politics had started earlier, both and peacemaking.
World Wars might have been averted. (Bc peace was understood as the minimum condition
- Boulding added that moving conflict from folk knowledge to scientific for cooperation; conflict as the starting point on the
knowledge has a stabilising effect. path toward war.
=> This produced a strong emphasis on quantitative analysis,
game theory, and interdisciplinary research.
,By the 1970s, however, the field outgrew its nuclear focus: Post-Cold War: The fall of the Berlin Wall and USSR (1991)
- Scholars recognised that other issues demanded initially created great optimism.
attention: conflicts over justice, equality, human dignity, - Fukuyama's "End of History" suggested liberal democracy
and ecological balance. had won. But this was short-lived: 82 armed conflicts
—> New social movements (civil rights, feminism, anti- erupted between 1989 and 1992.
war) brought nonviolent conflict resolution to the - Huntington offered an alternative prediction: Cold War
centre of the discipline. ideological conflicts would be replaced by clashes over
identity (ethnicity, religion, nationalism).
These failures coincided with a concentration of crises in = The most important shift: from interstate to intra-state
Africa, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. conflict.
By 1993, the UN designated 26 complex emergencies And if wars happen within countries, that raises entirely new
affecting 59 million people. questions about how to study and respond to them.
= a major humanitarian crisis with multiple causes —> Research expanded rapidly into conflict prevention,
(political + conflict + peacekeeping) requiring a system- humanitarianism, and violence.
wide response. —> The UN's Agenda for Peace argued: "it is much cheaper to
prevent conflict than to resolve it." This opened space for
The concept later evolved to emerging political complexes, peacekeeping (e.g. Rwanda), but many interventions
reflecting how these crises are not static but constantly failed => creating a new research agenda on the limits of
shifting. humanitarian intervention.
These complex emergencies led scholars to ask: are we Today, the field grapples with six unresolved questions
dealing with a fundamentally new kind of war? 1. Liberal peace & its critiques: does the Western
=> The "new wars" thesis highlights several features: peacebuilding model actually work?
• No clear goals or ideological coherence among 2. Peace vs. anti-terrorism: is peace about deep transformation
participants or just maintaining order?
• War = mix of organised violence, organised crime, and 3. Transnationalism & militarisation: how do cross-border
massive HR violations networks and global military competition shape conflict?
• New players: warlords, armed groups, PMCs 4. Normative questions: should researchers be peace activists
• Ideology matters less; conflicts driven by minerals, or neutral observers?
money, profit 5. Eurocentrism: the field's theories and journals are heavily
• Central gov's weaken, tribal/regional domains rise Western; how to reverse this?
6. Authoritarianism & populism: how do these rising trends
4. Defining the field affect conflict?
All of the above raises a basic question: what exactly do we mean by "conflict," "violence," "civil war," and "peace"? These definitions
are the building blocks for the rest of the course.
Violence Civil war
Conflict = is not just physical harm, it exists on = is the dominant form of conflict
= a situation where 2+ parties perceive mutually a spectrum (Cramer), where today. Two definitions capture
incompatible goals. different forms shade into each different aspects:
—> "Perceive" is key: it doesn't matter whether other. The categories below are
the goals are objectively incompatible; what useful, but the boundaries are
matters is that parties believe they are. artificial.
Three components, which reinforce each other:
Three ways to think about war:
= war as politics (extension of
political struggle), war as cumulative
(builds layer upon layer), war as idea
(shaped by beliefs and narratives).
In practice, these feed into each other:
Cycle: Incompatible goals → hostile attitudes structural violence (exclusion) fuels > Course assumption: all conflicts
→ aggressive behaviour → deeper incompatibility. manifest violence (armed conflict), and have an INT dimension. "Purely
symbolic violence (dehumanising internal" conflict does not exist.
narratives) legitimises both.
Peace (Galtung)
Class 2: Identity and conflict Finally, if we want to move from conflict to peace, we need to know
Post-Cold War era = shift from ideology-politics to identity- what peace actually means. Galtung's distinction is foundational:
politics as the main driver of conflict.
Mainstream reading: ethnic wars replaced leftist
revolutions and rightist coups as the primary source of
instability.
& Media framing reinforces this: headlines about Burundi, Negative peace is the minimum. Positive peace is the goal.
Myanmar, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan all frame violence as —> Much of the debate in conflict studies is whether INT
"ethnic conflict" between clearly defined identity groups. interventions achieve only negative peace (stop the fighting) or
also move toward positive peace (address the deeper structures
But, warning (Lemarchand): that caused it).
= ethnicity as a descriptor of violence is a poor guide to
understanding conflict. It hides the complexities,
interconnectedness, and local dynamics of violence.
,Politics and conflict are not ethnic but ethnicised.
But then, what is identity?
- Identity differences do not produce conflict: conflict
hardens ethnic boundaries and sharpens identity
differences.
- Conflict changes how people experience and define
their identity.
- Ethnicity ≠ identity. Ethnicity is only one form of identity.
This class focuses on identity at large.
If identity is flexible and context-dependent, then treating A social identity is defined by three elements: rules of membership,
identity groups as fixed blocs in conflict is problematic. content, and boundaries.
=> This is called the unitary trap.
3 Perspectives on identity:
= Identity-based conflict implies a causal link: identity
differences → violence.
But this is misleading because contemporary wars are not
binary conflicts between bounded, homogeneous groups.
- Levels of "groupness" are not constant: high groupness
is often a result of violent conflict, not a cause.
- Conflicts involve different forms of social organisation
(Hamas, Tamil Tigers, IRA), not identical "identity
groups."
So, key distinction: we must separate groups from
categories, and groups from organisations. Identity Capital
- Identity is a political resource. It resonates with people's social
Identity becomes politically powerful through narratives that space and gives meaning to political competition.
connect people to space, culture, and the past: - Politics confirms identity as a criterion for inclusion and
exclusion, producing a fragmented, unstable, and centrifugal
= Identity works as a narrative: it gives meaning to context political order.
through real and fictive elements that shape social behaviour.
"Invention of tradition" (Ranger & Hobsbawm) = selective These narratives do not emerge in a vacuum. In conflict settings,
construction of collective memory. specific actors use them to mobilise support. This brings us to
three explanations of how identity and conflict interact
Three pillars of the narrative: in practice:
1) Space: "one belongs where one's ancestors are buried." 1. Elite Theory
Conflict arises when the space belongs to "us" but is = Political entrepreneurs orchestrate conflict to increase group
controlled by "them." cohesion and build a support base. Violence constructs more
2) Culture: a selection of specific cultural traits as emblems of i antagonistic identities, which fuels more violence (Fearon &
dentity. Reformulation of these traits creates cohesion and Laitin).
strengthens appeal. But why the identity card?
3) Past: groups need roots in history. Selective memory and > Scapegoating gives meaning to systemic problems beyond
imagination of traumatic/tragic events (real or imagined) are elite control (e.g. economic recession). It shifts debate from
crucial for collective identity. root causes to culture/identity, silences dissent ("traitors"),
and enables divide-and-rule.
The narrative transforms perceptions of past and present, Why do people follow?
reorganises groups, alters cultures, and reinterprets the world in > Media, narrative, collective fear, and mechanisms of social
order to change it (Martin). closure (fear of the other).
Cases: Rwanda, Iraq, former Yugoslavia, India, Sri Lanka,
Both elite theory and alliance theory focus on the strategic Catalonia, N Ireland, Corsica.
functions of identity. But a third perspective argues identity is
not just a tool: it has intrinsic emotional power: Elite theory offers a clear top-down logic, but critics argue it
underestimates the agency of ordinary people. That is where
3. Culturalism (Meaning of Identity) alliance theory comes in.
= Functionalist/instrumentalist views are ahistorical. Identity
matters for its own sake: emotional attachment to the ethnic 2. Alliance Theory (Kalyvas)
group, love for the ethno-nation and culture. Even if socially = Civilians are not passive or manipulated: they often manipulate
constructed, these attachments are persistent and central actors to settle their own local conflicts. War allows
emotionally powerful. different types of violence for different, often localised,
agendas.
Symbolic politics model (Kaufman)
= extreme identity violence is caused by group myths justifying Alliance is a transaction: supralocal actors provide external
hostility + fears of group extinction + chauvinist mobilisation. muscle to local actors (who gain local advantage); in return,
Not instrumental mobilisation but the reverse: emotion drives supralocal actors gain recruits, resources, information, and
mobilisation. local control.
—> This merges different agendas, objectives, interests, and
Critique: too much emphasis on myths essentialises culture. identities.
Example: Al Qaeda as a set of movements forging alliances
<-> Counter: emotional power and historical grounding do driven by localised agendas.
matter. Ethnic attachments provide answers to fundamental
human questions: destiny, continuity, meaning (e.g. the role of
the "nation").
Class 1: Introduction & definition of the field of study
1. The world today: developments 2. Trends in conflict
The world is experiencing several interconnected trends that 1. Internationalisation
shape contemporary conflict: Almost no conflict is purely internal: there is nearly always
1. Increase in militarisation: rising defence budgets, more another country involved.
competition = Different conflict logics overlap & interfere w each other.
2. New forms of political rule: democracy replaced by Examples:
authoritarianism & populism = changes how conflicts • Mali: multiple armed groups (JNIM/al-Qaeda, ISIS, Tuareg)
emerge and are managed + Mali's army supported by Wagner Group. Ukraine
3. N of conflicts is rising: new players, more types of armed supported Tuareg with drones = Tuareg killed ~60% of
groups, private military companies (PMCs) Wagner forces in one attack.
—> Also N of casualties is rising (especially in civil wars). • Libya: civil war led to 2 competing gov's (one UN-
4. More territories controlled by non-state armed groups recognised, one not). Involved: UAE, TUR, ITA, Qatar, etc.
5. Revolution in communication: easier to spread fake news, • Sudan: similar fragmentation with INT involvement.
harder to understand what really happens in conflict zones
6. Geographic shift: conflicts were concentrated in the Global 2 Subcontracting Security
South, but now also in EUR again (e.g. UKR) = States increasingly outsource security to PMCs instead of
—> some conflict maps exclude cases like Mexico (cartels relying on UN peacekeeping.
not classified as "conflict"). And the rise of those - Wagner Group = Russian foreign policy tool
conflicts is also unprecedented. - Sadat = Turkish equivalent of Wagner
- Blackwater = US equivalent, supported in Iraq for ex.
3. CS as a field of research
= Peace & conflict studies is Key difference from classic mercenaries:
- a transformative, interdisciplinary field = PMCs are not just profit-driven, they also serve geopolitical
- analytical, nonviolent in orientation, uses both theoretical and interests of their home states
a-theoretical methods, and is global in scope. (e.g. Wagner = instrument of Russian foreign policy).
- offers nonviolent strategies to address conflict at all levels => Raises serious issues of accountability and legitimacy.
(micro, meso, macro, mega).
3. Fragmented Security Landscapes
Core aim = twofold: = Conflict zones are highly fragmented: many armed groups,
1. Understand what is going on in conflicts (causes & unclear zones of control
consequences) • Challenges: where to start peace efforts? When does a
2. Transform violence into non-violence (peacebuilding) group "control" an area?
Conflict studies is often called "a child of its time": 4. Communication & Technology
= didn't emerge from abstract theorising but as a direct response - Drones: UKR war = biggest push for drone warfare (even
to world events. It is multidisciplinary, drawing from polsci, soc, gamers recruited to operate drones) bc they are cheap, easy
psychology, law, history, … to use and hard to defend against.
- Fake news: distorts understanding of conflict zones, makes
Since the 2000s, there has been an exponential growth in reliable info harder to get
researchers, practitioners, and research centres.
But: intellectual roots go back much further: The crucial shift But it was the World Wars that turned this thinking into a
in the early 20th movement.
century: from = The scale of killing in WWI triggered a wave of pacifism
philosophical and anti-war organisations, all aiming to generate anti-
reflection on war sentiment and encourage peaceful INT relations.
peace to actually - Ishiyama & Breuning: the horror of WWI led to new efforts to
making rules understand, prevent, and eliminate war
about war. - Quincy Wright: A Study of War (1942) = 15-year interdisciplinary
research project on causes of war
- Dada art movement (1915-1923) = anti-war cultural response
- INT Fellowship of Reconciliation (est. 1919) = religious NGO
promoting nonviolence
The field truly took shape during the Cold War, when the
nuclear threat dominated everything. After WWII, these sentiments crystallised into a formal field.
- New conflicts kept emerging (Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, - INT Relations was founded as a discipline in 1919 (Univ.
decolonisation), and scholars studied violent conflict on three College of Wales, Carnegie Endowment for INT Peace).
levels: domestic, interstate & intrastate. + Social psychologists and natural scientists joined
—> A key belief of this era: science could prevent war. —> The early focus was on arms races, revolutions, wars,
- Singer argued that if scientific study of politics had started earlier, both and peacemaking.
World Wars might have been averted. (Bc peace was understood as the minimum condition
- Boulding added that moving conflict from folk knowledge to scientific for cooperation; conflict as the starting point on the
knowledge has a stabilising effect. path toward war.
=> This produced a strong emphasis on quantitative analysis,
game theory, and interdisciplinary research.
,By the 1970s, however, the field outgrew its nuclear focus: Post-Cold War: The fall of the Berlin Wall and USSR (1991)
- Scholars recognised that other issues demanded initially created great optimism.
attention: conflicts over justice, equality, human dignity, - Fukuyama's "End of History" suggested liberal democracy
and ecological balance. had won. But this was short-lived: 82 armed conflicts
—> New social movements (civil rights, feminism, anti- erupted between 1989 and 1992.
war) brought nonviolent conflict resolution to the - Huntington offered an alternative prediction: Cold War
centre of the discipline. ideological conflicts would be replaced by clashes over
identity (ethnicity, religion, nationalism).
These failures coincided with a concentration of crises in = The most important shift: from interstate to intra-state
Africa, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. conflict.
By 1993, the UN designated 26 complex emergencies And if wars happen within countries, that raises entirely new
affecting 59 million people. questions about how to study and respond to them.
= a major humanitarian crisis with multiple causes —> Research expanded rapidly into conflict prevention,
(political + conflict + peacekeeping) requiring a system- humanitarianism, and violence.
wide response. —> The UN's Agenda for Peace argued: "it is much cheaper to
prevent conflict than to resolve it." This opened space for
The concept later evolved to emerging political complexes, peacekeeping (e.g. Rwanda), but many interventions
reflecting how these crises are not static but constantly failed => creating a new research agenda on the limits of
shifting. humanitarian intervention.
These complex emergencies led scholars to ask: are we Today, the field grapples with six unresolved questions
dealing with a fundamentally new kind of war? 1. Liberal peace & its critiques: does the Western
=> The "new wars" thesis highlights several features: peacebuilding model actually work?
• No clear goals or ideological coherence among 2. Peace vs. anti-terrorism: is peace about deep transformation
participants or just maintaining order?
• War = mix of organised violence, organised crime, and 3. Transnationalism & militarisation: how do cross-border
massive HR violations networks and global military competition shape conflict?
• New players: warlords, armed groups, PMCs 4. Normative questions: should researchers be peace activists
• Ideology matters less; conflicts driven by minerals, or neutral observers?
money, profit 5. Eurocentrism: the field's theories and journals are heavily
• Central gov's weaken, tribal/regional domains rise Western; how to reverse this?
6. Authoritarianism & populism: how do these rising trends
4. Defining the field affect conflict?
All of the above raises a basic question: what exactly do we mean by "conflict," "violence," "civil war," and "peace"? These definitions
are the building blocks for the rest of the course.
Violence Civil war
Conflict = is not just physical harm, it exists on = is the dominant form of conflict
= a situation where 2+ parties perceive mutually a spectrum (Cramer), where today. Two definitions capture
incompatible goals. different forms shade into each different aspects:
—> "Perceive" is key: it doesn't matter whether other. The categories below are
the goals are objectively incompatible; what useful, but the boundaries are
matters is that parties believe they are. artificial.
Three components, which reinforce each other:
Three ways to think about war:
= war as politics (extension of
political struggle), war as cumulative
(builds layer upon layer), war as idea
(shaped by beliefs and narratives).
In practice, these feed into each other:
Cycle: Incompatible goals → hostile attitudes structural violence (exclusion) fuels > Course assumption: all conflicts
→ aggressive behaviour → deeper incompatibility. manifest violence (armed conflict), and have an INT dimension. "Purely
symbolic violence (dehumanising internal" conflict does not exist.
narratives) legitimises both.
Peace (Galtung)
Class 2: Identity and conflict Finally, if we want to move from conflict to peace, we need to know
Post-Cold War era = shift from ideology-politics to identity- what peace actually means. Galtung's distinction is foundational:
politics as the main driver of conflict.
Mainstream reading: ethnic wars replaced leftist
revolutions and rightist coups as the primary source of
instability.
& Media framing reinforces this: headlines about Burundi, Negative peace is the minimum. Positive peace is the goal.
Myanmar, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan all frame violence as —> Much of the debate in conflict studies is whether INT
"ethnic conflict" between clearly defined identity groups. interventions achieve only negative peace (stop the fighting) or
also move toward positive peace (address the deeper structures
But, warning (Lemarchand): that caused it).
= ethnicity as a descriptor of violence is a poor guide to
understanding conflict. It hides the complexities,
interconnectedness, and local dynamics of violence.
,Politics and conflict are not ethnic but ethnicised.
But then, what is identity?
- Identity differences do not produce conflict: conflict
hardens ethnic boundaries and sharpens identity
differences.
- Conflict changes how people experience and define
their identity.
- Ethnicity ≠ identity. Ethnicity is only one form of identity.
This class focuses on identity at large.
If identity is flexible and context-dependent, then treating A social identity is defined by three elements: rules of membership,
identity groups as fixed blocs in conflict is problematic. content, and boundaries.
=> This is called the unitary trap.
3 Perspectives on identity:
= Identity-based conflict implies a causal link: identity
differences → violence.
But this is misleading because contemporary wars are not
binary conflicts between bounded, homogeneous groups.
- Levels of "groupness" are not constant: high groupness
is often a result of violent conflict, not a cause.
- Conflicts involve different forms of social organisation
(Hamas, Tamil Tigers, IRA), not identical "identity
groups."
So, key distinction: we must separate groups from
categories, and groups from organisations. Identity Capital
- Identity is a political resource. It resonates with people's social
Identity becomes politically powerful through narratives that space and gives meaning to political competition.
connect people to space, culture, and the past: - Politics confirms identity as a criterion for inclusion and
exclusion, producing a fragmented, unstable, and centrifugal
= Identity works as a narrative: it gives meaning to context political order.
through real and fictive elements that shape social behaviour.
"Invention of tradition" (Ranger & Hobsbawm) = selective These narratives do not emerge in a vacuum. In conflict settings,
construction of collective memory. specific actors use them to mobilise support. This brings us to
three explanations of how identity and conflict interact
Three pillars of the narrative: in practice:
1) Space: "one belongs where one's ancestors are buried." 1. Elite Theory
Conflict arises when the space belongs to "us" but is = Political entrepreneurs orchestrate conflict to increase group
controlled by "them." cohesion and build a support base. Violence constructs more
2) Culture: a selection of specific cultural traits as emblems of i antagonistic identities, which fuels more violence (Fearon &
dentity. Reformulation of these traits creates cohesion and Laitin).
strengthens appeal. But why the identity card?
3) Past: groups need roots in history. Selective memory and > Scapegoating gives meaning to systemic problems beyond
imagination of traumatic/tragic events (real or imagined) are elite control (e.g. economic recession). It shifts debate from
crucial for collective identity. root causes to culture/identity, silences dissent ("traitors"),
and enables divide-and-rule.
The narrative transforms perceptions of past and present, Why do people follow?
reorganises groups, alters cultures, and reinterprets the world in > Media, narrative, collective fear, and mechanisms of social
order to change it (Martin). closure (fear of the other).
Cases: Rwanda, Iraq, former Yugoslavia, India, Sri Lanka,
Both elite theory and alliance theory focus on the strategic Catalonia, N Ireland, Corsica.
functions of identity. But a third perspective argues identity is
not just a tool: it has intrinsic emotional power: Elite theory offers a clear top-down logic, but critics argue it
underestimates the agency of ordinary people. That is where
3. Culturalism (Meaning of Identity) alliance theory comes in.
= Functionalist/instrumentalist views are ahistorical. Identity
matters for its own sake: emotional attachment to the ethnic 2. Alliance Theory (Kalyvas)
group, love for the ethno-nation and culture. Even if socially = Civilians are not passive or manipulated: they often manipulate
constructed, these attachments are persistent and central actors to settle their own local conflicts. War allows
emotionally powerful. different types of violence for different, often localised,
agendas.
Symbolic politics model (Kaufman)
= extreme identity violence is caused by group myths justifying Alliance is a transaction: supralocal actors provide external
hostility + fears of group extinction + chauvinist mobilisation. muscle to local actors (who gain local advantage); in return,
Not instrumental mobilisation but the reverse: emotion drives supralocal actors gain recruits, resources, information, and
mobilisation. local control.
—> This merges different agendas, objectives, interests, and
Critique: too much emphasis on myths essentialises culture. identities.
Example: Al Qaeda as a set of movements forging alliances
<-> Counter: emotional power and historical grounding do driven by localised agendas.
matter. Ethnic attachments provide answers to fundamental
human questions: destiny, continuity, meaning (e.g. the role of
the "nation").
