Civilizational fault lines running through states breed chronic civil war and secession

Evidence

Cleft countries that territorially bestride the fault lines between civilizations face particular problems maintaining their unity. In Sudan, civil war has gone on for decades between the Muslim north and the largely Christian south. The same civilizational division has bedeviled Nigerian politics for a similar length of time and stimulated one major war of secession plus coups, rioting, and other violence. In Tanzania, the Christian animist mainland and Arab Muslim Zanzibar have drifted apart and in many respects become two separate countries, with Zanzibar in 1992 secretly joining the Organization of the Islamic Conference and then being induced by Tanzania to withdraw from it the following year. The same Christian-Muslim division has generated tensions and conflicts in Kenya. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 376

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete case list (Sudan, Nigeria, Tanzania/Zanzibar) could serve as evidence brief for the sacrifice/national-cohesion theme — how states fail when they straddle religious lines.