Divided We Fall: Cohesion and Fragmentation in Excluded Minority Movements

Abstract

Ethnic minorities face a-priori incentives to form cohesive political movements when confronting structurally advantaged majorities in ethnic states. In spite of these incentives, scholarship has consistently shown organizational fragmentation to be the norm. Why? Why are ethnopolitical minority movements organizationally fragmented in some cases, and cohesive in others? What is the impact of ethnic exclusion on minority movements’ cohesiveness? This dissertation argues that ethnic minority leaders’ perceptions of opportunity and threat shape their movements’ internal organizational patterns and strategies. It illustrates a variety of ways in which the attribution of opportunity and threat informs leaders’ strategic choices, facilitates and constrains inter-ethnic coalition-building, and ultimately, shapes the patterns of cohesion and fragmentation within ethnopolitical minority movements. Overall, this project argues that movements are most likely to fragment when their leaders perceive the environment as either extraordinarily open or closed; environments which are perceived as moderately challenging are associated with organizational cohesion. Ideological and strategic differences serve as intermediary variables: political actors face incentives to reconsider their broad strategies in extraordinarily challenging, closed political environments (causing fragmentation), set aside internal strategic and ideological differences in moderately challenging environments (leading to increased unity), and differentiate along ideological lines in exceptionally open political environments (causing fragmentation). Each of this dissertation’s three articles adds a component to this overall theory. The first article traces changes in Palestinian leaders’ perceptions of opportunity and threat within Israel since 2015. The second compares and contrasts the strategic choices of Palestinian and Kurdish leaders within Israel and Turkey (respectively) over longer timespans, since these states’ establishment. The third makes the case that Palestinian and Jewish activists are integrated into a broader, binational, counter-hegemonic movement within Israel, resisting the state’s ethnic-hierarchical order. This project primarily relies on data from 35 semi-structured interviews with 36 Palestinian and Jewish politicians and activists, conducted between 2017-2023, as well as extensive media and archival research. The argument is established through primarily qualitative methods, including process tracing, discursive content analysis, and diachronic comparative analysis in the Israeli case, supplemented by synchronic analysis using additional evidence from Turkey.