The Loyalty Trap: Regime Ethnic Exclusion, Commitment Problems, and Civil War Duration in Syria and Beyond

This article examines the impact of the ethnic exclusiveness of on commitment problems and hence on civil conflict. It argues that members of privileged in-groups in exclusive regimes can be trapped into compliance with regime. Ethnic exclusion helps to construct privileged-group as regime loyalists. They therefore fear rebel reprisals if they surrender or defect and consequently persist in. The article finds in particular that, in ethnically regimes, privileged-group members mistrust even who mobilize on a nonethnic agenda and regard rebel, including nonethnic aims, as suspect. Exclusion induces privileged-group cohesion, an effect more to rebel reassurances than previously recognized. A study of the Syrian civil war shows this dynamic at a micro, and a cross-national statistical analysis gives partial that it lengthens civil conflicts on a larg`e scale.