In profile: Daniel Posner
When Daniel Posner began studying ethnic politics in Zambia, in 1993, he encountered a puzzle. Many residents told him that members of one linguistic group, the Bemba-speaking people, were unfairly controlling the levers of government to further their own self-interest. But when Posner talked to people named in these complaints, they described themselves not in linguistic terms, but by tribe: They were serving not as Bembas, but as members of, for instance, the Bisa, Lunda, Chishunga or Mambwe ethnic groups. He soon realized he had encountered an important feature of Zambian politics. “People had these nested identities,” says Posner, who has recently joined MIT as the Total Chair on Contemporary Africa and Professor of Political Science. “This seemed to have important implications for ethnic politics and intergroup relations.”What he discovered, surprisingly, is that the ethnic self-identification of Zambians is highly contingent on the state’s form of government. In the periods...