Article summary
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.