How inventing political adversaries can create real civil division

While it is widely assumed that civil wars reinforce the existing political divisions, a recent sociological study sheds light on how these divisions actually can be reinvented during social conflict. The study, “Fabricating Communists: The Imagined Third That Reinvented the National Fault Line in Mid-Twentieth-Century Colombia’s Civil War,” by Laura Acosta (University of California-San Diego), is published in the December 2025 issue of the American Sociological Review.

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