This article explains why the presence of coethnics across a border sometimes leads governments to treat that land as part of the homeland—and why it often does not. The key argument is that variation hinges on whether regimes rely on ethnic logics to secure domestic legitimacy. When a regime uses shared ethnicity to win support, ethnicity becomes more politically salient, cross-border coethnic populations become socially meaningful, and claims to lost territory as part of the homeland are more likely to persist.

🔎 Where the Evidence Comes From

• Uses survival analysis to test how the presence of coethnics on lost lands affects whether those lands continue to be categorized as part of the homeland.
• Supplements quantitative analysis with a focused case study of Croatia to illustrate the mechanisms at work.

📊 What the Analysis Shows

• The presence of coethnics on lost lands significantly increases the likelihood that those lands will retain homeland status, but this effect is context-dependent.
• The effect is concentrated in settings where ethnic legitimacy is politically prominent, including:
• autocracies,
• states that marginalize populations along ethnic lines,
• countries where governments cannot anchor legitimacy in economic performance.
• Where ethnic legitimacy is weak or absent, coethnic presence has a much smaller or negligible impact on homeland claims.

⚖️ Why This Matters

• Reveals how domestic political strategies shape the meaning of ethnicity for territorial claims, rather than treating cross-border ethnic ties as an automatic driver of irredentism.
• Clarifies when and why ethnicity interacts with domestic politics to produce sustained territorial claims, with implications for explaining patterns of territorial conflict.

🔍 Takeaway

• The link between coethnics abroad and homeland claims is not mechanical: it depends on whether governments make ethnicity the basis of their domestic legitimacy, a dynamic demonstrated through survival models and a Croatia case study.