Mapping Ethnic, Religious, and Regional Cleavages

Cleavages become politically dangerous or politically manageable depending on geography. If a group is scattered evenly across a country, its identity rarely becomes a territorial claim, because no region can plausibly speak for it alone. But when a group is concentrated in one place, that place becomes a political unit in its own right: a voting bloc, a protest base, a candidate for autonomy or secession. Mapping cleavages means plotting where ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups actually live and then checking whether those regions also vote, protest, or demand power as blocs.

Nigeria shows the pattern clearly: a largely Muslim Hausa-Fulani north, a Christian Yoruba southwest, and a Christian Igbo southeast, with national elections and past conflict following those same regional lines. Iran shows a variant: a Persian, Shia majority controls the center and the state, while Azerbaijani and Kurdish minorities sit concentrated near the borders, giving them a distinct regional identity even though Iran has not split along those lines the way Nigeria nearly did. China shows a third pattern: a Han majority covers most of the country's population and territory, while recognized minorities such as Tibetans and Uyghurs are concentrated in large but sparsely populated border regions, which the state governs through nominally autonomous zones it still tightly controls.

What happens when a cleavage lines up with geography also depends on what else lines up with it. If the same region that is ethnically distinct is also the poorest, or the most resource-rich but least rewarded, the grievances stack: one line on the map now carries identity, income, and power all at once, which is far harder to resolve than any single cleavage alone.