Divide and Conquer
What it is
Fragmenting potential opposition into smaller, weaker groups that fight each other rather than unifying against the common threat.
How it works
Real-world examples
- •Empire: the British partition of Bengal (1905) and separate electorates for Muslims (1909) hardened communal identities the Raj could balance against each other; Belgian identity cards in Rwanda (1933) fixed Hutu and Tutsi as legal categories.
- •Labor: coal and mill operators hired across ethnic lines and housed groups separately to hinder organizing; the 1913 to 1914 Colorado coal strike ended in the Ludlow massacre.
- •COINTELPRO, 1968 to 1971: the FBI forged letters to set the Black Panther Party and the US Organization against each other in Los Angeles; two Panthers were killed in 1969.
- •2016: the Internet Research Agency ran pages on both sides, Blacktivist and Heart of Texas, a Muslim-rights page and an anti-Islam page, and in Houston organized rival protests at the same mosque on May 21, 2016 (Senate Intelligence Committee, 2019).
- •Primaries: campaigns amplify the other side's internal fights; Bernie or bust and Never Trump in 2016 were both real and both exploited by opponents.
Ethical guidelines
- ●Deliberately fragmenting communities causes lasting social damage beyond the immediate political goal.
- ●This technique exploits genuine grievances — the underlying issues deserve honest engagement, not exploitation.
- ●Unity-building is harder than division-sowing, and far more valuable.
How to defend against it
- ►When internal conflicts suddenly escalate, ask who benefits from the division.
- ►Build coalitions around shared interests while creating space for genuine disagreements.
- ►Develop conflict resolution mechanisms before opponents can exploit natural tensions.
From the Defense Playbook
When you argue across a political or cultural divide, make your honest case in terms of the values the listener actually holds, not your own, because arguments grounded in the other side's moral vocabulary are heard as arguments while those grounded in yours are heard as noise.
A structured ten-to-twenty-minute conversation in which you ask someone's view without judgment, invite a story from their own life, share one of yours, and let them do the reasoning aloud; it is one of the few approaches shown in field experiments to shift attitudes durably.
To understand what another person thinks or wants, ask them and listen, instead of imagining yourself in their shoes; imagining feels insightful but in controlled tests does not improve accuracy, while asking does.
Check what you believe the other side thinks of your side against actual survey data, because partisans in many countries greatly overestimate how much their opponents dislike, dehumanize, and wish to obstruct them, and that exaggerated belief itself drives hostility.
Reduce hostility between groups by having them work together, as equals, toward a goal that both want and neither can reach alone; mere exposure or exhortation does little, but cooperative contact under the right conditions reliably lowers prejudice.
Every playbook entry states how strong its evidence is and when not to use it. Browse the full playbook.
DISARM framework
How analysts would file this in the open DISARM framework (v1.6.1, CC BY-SA 4.0). Closest matches, mapped by Persuasion Lab.
References
- Acemoglu, D., Robinson, J. A., & Verdier, T. (2004). Kleptocracy and divide-and-rule: A model of personal rule. Journal of the European Economic Association, 2(2–3), 162–192Formal model of how a ruler survives by pitting social groups against one another so that no coalition forms to remove him — the entry's claim that fragmented opposition is manageable while united opposition is dangerous.
- Sherif, M., Harvey, O. J., White, B. J., Hood, W. R., & Sherif, C. W. (1961). Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment. University Book Exchange, University of OklahomaField experiment showing that competition over resources rapidly produces hostility between groups, and that superordinate goals reduce it — the mechanism behind the entry's 'pitting subgroups against each other for resources or recognition' and its defence of refocusing on shared goals.