This study addresses dual questions of why a dominant party emerged within a distinct ethnic community in 2013, and how it monopolized representation.
This study problematises the relationship between national homeland and claimed ethnoterritory as a nested game in which, in addition to bargaining with each other, they face internal competition, outbidding, and changing costs of conflict, ultimately reducing commitment to external-facing bargains. This study contends that homelands pursuing irredentist conflict can reduce uncertainty and increase commitment from ethnoterritories by building hegemonic cross-border clientelist pyramids that link ethnoterritorial publics’ and elites’ political survival and livelihoods to supporting homelands’ preferences.
This study analyzes how cross-border (transnational) groups constrain state’s commitments in international mediation and argues they serve as “transnational veto players” whose incentive and cost structures fall out of alignment with the negotiating state during mediation.