The Politics of Territory in Ethnically Polarized Cities: Looking for a Comparative Framework

The paper represents a preliminary theoretical recognition for a project on the role of divided cities in ethno national conflicts. This project will be carried out through a comparative research on three or four case studies. The founding hypothesis of this project is that territory represents one of the main dimensions of ethno national conflicts, because of the nature of the conflict itself and the use of territorial strategy by its actors. In these situations, the presence of “polarized cities” (Bollens 2007) represents both one of the main bones of contention and a fundamental element in re-shaping the very nature of the conflict. From an analytic point of view, polarized cities represent a good point of observation to understand the link between territorial (urban) policies and the dynamics of ethnic conflicts and of divided societies in general. The goal of this paper is therefore to sketch out a general framework to define the various kinds of ethnic conflicts with reference to macro territorial variables, such as: the historical background (i.e.: the dynamics of state expansion and contraction), the political and institutional context (i.e.: the structure of the access to decision-making process) and the territorial shape of the polity (i.e.: the relation between central authority and territorially-defined sub-units), the distribution and consistence of the various ethnic groups (i.e.: cohesiveness and concentration), the presence of contested territorially defined resources (and cities in particular), etc. This framework should operate to permit the choice of appropriate case studies and refine the hypothesis to be tested in future researches. This paper represents an intermediate step: our primary goal will be to define the theoretical framework and the main variables and secondly to receive some useful feedback for the case study selection.