Mahmood Mamdani (1996, 1999) has attracted much attention with his historicising model of the trajectory of African politics. The most fertile innovation in Mamdani's work is to speak of the typical African state as 'bifurcated'. He generalises South Africa's apartheid system to the whole of...

We model a rent-seeking contest among two "identity ideologues", differentially located along a uni-dimensional identity continuum, and a "mercenary", who can choose any location in-between. The contest jointly awards an identity-relevant good ("religion") and an identity-irrelevant good...