Foreign Fights, Familiar Foes: How Distant Wars Shape Local Tensions

• In Event: The Political Ramifications of Violence

Abstract

Do distant wars affect the domestic politics of non-belligerent countries? We theorize that armed conflicts can change the salience of national identification and policy preferences even in countries not at risk of direct involvement in the armed conflict. In particular, in countries with a recent history of interstate or internal conflict, news of fighting abroad may lead citizens to draw parallels between the two conflicts and map these distant events onto their own historical narrative. As citizens begin to identify with one of the warring parties, they will come to see it as a "narrative proxy" for themselves and update their beliefs about their own conflict based on this proxy's fate. Specifically, we expect that they will feel greater hostility toward their local rival groups, greater affinity for their ingroup, and, depending on the side they identify with, fears of renewed victimization or hopes for revanchist expansion and revenge. As they draw lessons from how great powers and interstate organizations intercede in this proxy conflict, they will update their own national security and foreign policy preferences—for instance, preferring NATO or EU membership as a path to safety. We test these predictions with a pair of pre-registered survey experiments in Bosnia and Serbia scheduled for February 2024. Respondents assigned to treatment are asked to reflect and write about the Russian-Ukrainian war, while assigned to control are given a placebo topic. We then measure respondents' attitudes, perceptions, and policy preferences through both quantitative and open-ended questions. Our analysis will compare treatment effects among Serbian citizens (with regards to the Kosovo-Serbia conflict) and Bosnian citizens (with regards to the Bosnian Muslim-Croat-Serb conflict) to see if our predictions hold across multiple groups and conflict narratives. Ultimately, we expect our findings will enhance our understanding of how waves of revolutions, protest, or intergroup conflict spread far beyond the regions where they first began.

Authors

• Laia Balcells, Georgetown University

• Ana Paula Pellegrino, Georgetown University