Sambanis, Skaperdas, Wohlforth 2015, ‘Nation-Building through War’

Published

March 30, 2026

Notes

Hopefully you can guess by now—you don’t need to know the mathy bits for our purposes in this course. The key sections of the paper to focus on are:

  • The qualitative exposition of the argument on pages 279–282.
  • The summary of the formal model results on pages 284–285 (starting with “In sum, when we add…”).
  • The introduction to the Franco-Prussian war on pages 285–286.
  • The full case study of the Franco-Prussian war on pages 289–292.
  • The conclusion on pages 292–293.

Even within those sections, don’t worry about the stuff pertaining to debates over “neorealism” and “the second image reversed.” No serious scholar of international politics cares about neorealism anymore. Focus on the core substantive arguments about how war affects nationalism via status, and how that in turn influences the likelihood of war in the first place.

Questions

Three key concepts in this article are “state power,” “international status,” and “social cohesion.” What does each of these concepts mean? What are the key differences between them? What do the authors see as the main relationships among these concepts?

In what sense do the authors claim that their theory is compatible with the “war made the state” argument, and in what senses do they claim to innovate on that argument?

Some people think leaders use international war as a distraction from domestic problems, or even as a way to gain popularity by engendering a rally-round-the-flag effect. How does the theory in this article differ from this “diversionary war” theory?

According to the authors, what are the domestic political consequences of victory or defeat in war? What happens to the extent of national identification, and to the degree of state capacity?

Why can a country gain status even after losing a war?

What are the conditions that create the most risk that a country will pursue “nation building through war,” according to the authors?

In what ways does the Franco-Prussian War provide evidence for the authors’ theory? Why do they think their theory does a better job explaining the war than alternative explanations do? (FYI, if you’re taking the process tracing route in your final project, I think the case study here provides a good model of how to undertake that type of analysis.)