Contested legitimacy and sovereignty lie at the heart of violent conflicts. As Wimmer1 argues, such conflicts represent “the struggle between competing projects of state-building based on different principles of political legitimacy”. Conflict parties perceive each other’s identities, national projects, and claims as mutually exclusive and zero-sum, where recognising the identity of the rival group is viewed as a threat to their own group’s survival and national existence.2 At the core of the conflicts is the effort to reinforce in-group legitimacy by denying the legitimacy of the opposing group and its claims. As argued by Kelman: “Negation of the other’s identity and of the narrative in which it is embedded becomes so important to the conflict that it is incorporated in the identity that each group constructed for itself and in the narrative that it presents to the world”.3