Lars-Erik Cederman: The Empire Strikes Back: Imperial Loss, Dominant Nationalism and Interstate Conflict | Higher Research Seminar

Empires are formally obsolete, but former imperial spaces continue to shape interstate conflict. This paper asks when territorial loss becomes imperial loss: when do lost territories become politically salient as fragments of a larger historical order, and when do such claims escalate into war? Existing research emphasizes ethnic incongruence, irredentism, and imperial legacies, but often leaves unclear who mobilizes lost territory and whether revisionist claims seek to recover co-nationals or restore a broader former order. We develop a theory of imperial-restorative nationalism. Territorial loss becomes especially conflict-prone when dominant nationalists reinterpret it as national humiliation, status reversal, or artificial fragmentation and turn former imperial space into a program of restoration. We distinguish lost-kin claims, which target co-nationals and divided homelands, from lost-empire claims, which target territories associated with predecessor polities even where co-national settlement is weak or absent. To test the argument, we combine new spatial measures of historical territorial loss with data on dominant nationalist rule and interstate conflict in directed dyad-years. We first analyze European territorial histories reaching back to 1100 and then extend the scope to a global sample from 1886. Imperial loss alone does not reliably predict conflict. Yet when dominant nationalists govern the potential challenger, lost imperial territory becomes strongly conflict-prone, including in cases without ethnic kin.

Lars-Erik Cederman is professor of International Conflict Research at ETH Zürich. He has (co)published four monographs: Emergent Actors in World Politics (Princeton 1997), Inequality Grievances and Civil War (CUP 2013), Sharing Power, Securing Peace? (CUP 2022), and Nationalism and the Transformation of the State (CUP 2025), as well as numerous articles in leading journals in political science and beyond.