Conflict and Cohesion: A Review of the Literature

The paper reviews the theoretical formulations and the empirical tests of the proposition that external conflict increases internal cohesion. Literature from sociology, anthropology, psychology, and political science is discussed. Though it is often assumed to be true and is easily illustrated, the empirical studies suggest that there are a number of intervening variables and that the hypothesis is not uniformly true. While hardly adequate, these empirical studies provide a subtler specification of the hypothesis, knowledge of which can lead researchers to structure their studies differently. Examples of this are provided and other areas of application are also discussed.