The Legacy of Multi-Dimensional Conflict
2025-09-24
The literature on the long-term effects of violence suggests that the original cleavage that gave rise to conflict is perpetuated through intergenerational transfer of ingroup-outgroup hatred between victims and perpetrators. This assumes that conflicts usually have a single cleavage, whereas, much violence is multidimensional. We study the legacy of a multidimensional conflict, the Spanish civil war, where the Left-Right ideological cleavage co-existed with the center-periphery divide. Leveraging a natural experiment of history and using panel data on voting and original survey data we show how in a multidimensional conflict a cleavage that pre-conflict was secondary became dominant in the aftermath of violence in response to changes in political discourse. Specifically, we demonstrate how communities that suffered more from Rightist violence became more supportive of regional autonomy rather than Leftist parties. These findings suggest that historical memory of conflict can be redefined as a result of post-conflict politics.