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Fiscal Space and the Supply of Pro‐Government Militias
Abstract
Militias hamper state‐building by undermining the government's monopoly of violence, which creates an environment of anarchy. Yet many governments collaborate with them. These pro‐government militias (PGMs), such as paramilitary groups, are not only a poor‐country phenomenon, that is, economic growth does not seem to eradicate these armed nonstate actors: Intriguingly, cross‐country data reveals a U‐shaped relationship between GDP per capita and PGM presence. This article presents an economic theory of PGM supply that can explain this puzzling relationship and provide actionable ways for international actors (e.g., UN) to discourage the emergence of PGMs. However, the theory also cautions that some common international policies (e.g., development aid) may unintentionally encourage PGM supply.
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This article presents version 2.0 of the Pro-Government Militias Database (PGMD). It is increasingly clear that it is untenable to assume a unified security sector, as states often rely on militias to carry out security tasks. The PGMD 2.0 provides new opportunities for studying questions such as when states rely on militias, how they chose among different types and the consequences for stability and peace. We detail how the PGMD 2.0 provides new information on the characteristics, behaviour, life cycle and organization of 504 pro-government militias across the globe between 1981 and 2014.
For all the academic and policy interest in Nigeria’s Boko Haram insurgency, the coping strategies of civilians who survive amid everyday violence have received relatively little attention. Focusing on the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF), a pro-government militia fighting Boko Haram in northeastern Nigeria, Agbiboa explores how and why the group emerged, the nature of its relationship with the state and local communities, and how counterinsurgent vigilantism affects the prospects for peace. A focus on vigilantes and civil militias vis-à-vis the state points to the vital role of civil-military cooperation for effective counterinsurgency campaigns and for reducing state violence against civilians. At the same time, it underscores the precariousness of protection both in terms of increasing the targeting of civilians by vengeful insurgents as well as the tendency for civilian defense groups to “turn bad” and become threats to the communities they were expected to protect.
This study investigates how deployment of pro-government militias (PGMs) as counterinsurgents affects the risk of conflict recurrence. Militiamen derive material and non-material benefits from fighting in armed conflicts. Since these will likely have diminished after the conflict’s termination, militiamen develop a strong incentive to spoil post-conflict peace. Members of pro-government militias are particularly disadvantaged in post-conflict contexts compared to their role in the government’s counterinsurgency campaign. First, PGMs are usually not present in peace negotiations between rebels and governments. This reduces their commitment to peace agreements. Second, disarmament and reintegration programs tend to exclude PGMs, which lowers their expected and real benefits from peace. Third, PGMs might lose their advantage of pursuing personal interests while being protected by the government, as they become less essential during peacetimes. To empirically test whether conflicts with PGMs as counterinsurgents are more likely to break out again, we identify PGM counterinsurgent activities in conflict episodes between 1981 and 2007. We code whether the same PGM was active in a subsequent conflict between the same actors. Controlling for conflict types, which is associated with both the likelihood of deploying PGMs and the risk of conflict recurrence, we investigate our claims with propensity score matching, statistical simulation, and logistic regression models. The results support our expectation that conflicts in which pro-government militias were used as counterinsurgents are more likely to recur. Our study contributes to an improved understanding of the long-term consequences of employing PGMs as counterinsurgents and highlights the importance of considering non-state actors when crafting peace and evaluating the risk of renewed violence.
Who rules during the civil war? This article argues that the concept of armed group governance must be expanded to include auxiliary armed forces linked to rebels or the government. Comparing the organization of rebel and government auxiliaries, the article demonstrates that security governance during war is never static, but evolves over time. Evidence from the civil war in Mozambique (1976–1992) shows that the auxiliary’s origin shapes its initial level of autonomy. Second, auxiliary contribution to battlefield success of one side may induce innovations adopted by auxiliaries on the other. Both have distinct consequences for the nature of governance.
Sociologists, political scientists, and economists have long emphasized the benefits of monopolizing violence and the risks of failing to do so. Yet recent research on conflict, state failure, genocide, coups, and election violence suggests governments cannot or will not form a monopoly. Governments worldwide are more risk acceptant than anticipated. They give arms and authority to a variety of nonstate actors, militias, vigilantes, death squads, proxy forces, paramilitaries, and counterbalancing forces. We develop a typology based on the links of the militia to the government and to society as a device to capture variations among these groups. We use the typology to explore insights from this emerging literature on the causes, consequences, and puzzling survival of progovernment militias and their implications for security and human rights, as well as to generate open questions for further research.
From Syria to Sudan, governments have informal ties with militias that use violence against opposition groups and civilians. Building on research that suggests these groups offer governments logistical benefits in civil wars as well as political benefits in the form of reduced liability for violence, we provide the first systematic global analysis of the scale and patterns of these informal linkages. We find over 200 informal state-militia relationships across the globe, within but also outside of civil wars. We illustrate how informal delegation of violence to these
This article assesses the effect that leveraging civilian defense force militias has on the dynamics of violence in civil war. We argue that the delegation of security and combat roles to local civilians shifts the primary targets of insurgent violence toward civilians, in an attempt to deter future defections, and re-establish control over the local population. This argument is assessed through an analysis of the Sunni Awakening and ancillary Sons of Iraq paramilitary program. The results suggest that at least in the Al-Anbar province of Iraq, the utilization of the civilian population in counterinsurgent roles had significant implications for the targets of insurgent violence.
New data show that between 1982-2007, in over 60 countries governments were linked to and cooperated with informal armed groups within their own borders. Given the prevalence of these linkages, we ask how such links between governments and informal armed groups influence the risk of repression. We draw on principal-agent arguments to explore how issues of monitoring and control help understanding of the impact of militias on human rights violations. We argue that such informal agents increase accountability problems for the governments, which is likely to worsen human rights conditions for two reasons. First, it is more difficult for governments to control and to train these militias and they may have private interests in the use of violence. Second, informal armed groups allow governments to shift responsibility and use repression for strategic benefits while evading accountability. Using a global dataset from 1982 to 2007, we show that pro-government militias increase the risk of repression and that the presence of militias also affects the type of violations that we observe.
This article introduces the global Pro-Government Militias Database (PGMD). Despite the devastating record of some pro-government groups, there has been little research on why these forces form, under what conditions they are most likely to act, and how they affect the risk of internal conflict, repression, and state fragility. From events in the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Sudan, or Syria and the countries of the Arab Spring we know that pro-government militias operate in a variety of contexts. They are often linked with extreme violence and disregard for the laws of war. Yet research, notably quantitative research, lags behind events. In this article we give an overview of the PGMD, a new global dataset that identifies pro-government militias from 1981 to 2007. The information on pro-government militias (PGMs) is presented in a relational data structure, which allows researchers to browse and download different versions of the dataset and access over 3,500 sources that informed the coding. The database shows the wide proliferation and diffusion of these groups. We identify 332 PGMs and specify how they are linked to government, for example via the governing political party, individual leaders, or the military. The dataset captures the type of affiliation of the groups to the government by distinguishing between informal and semi-official militias. It identifies, among others, membership characteristics and the types of groups they target. These data are likely to be relevant to research on state strength and state failure, the dynamics of conflict, including security sector reform, demobilization and reintegration, as well as work on human rights and the interactions between different state and non-state actors. To illustrate uses of the data, we include the PGM data in a standard model of armed conflict and find that such groups increase the risk of civil war.
This paper examines interaction in the absence of property rights when agents face a trade-off between productive and coercive activities. In this setting, conflict is not the necessary outcome of one-time interaction and cooperation is consistent with domination of one agent over another. Other things being equal, an agent's power, a well-defined concept in this paper, is inversely related to an agent's resources when resources are valued according to marginal-productivity theory. Some implications for the evolution of property rights are drawn. The model is applicable to a variety of situations in which directly unproductive activities are prevalent. Copyright 1992 by American Economic Association.
To develop a positive, economic theory of military spending, this analysis focuses on a game-theoretic, general equilibrium model of international conflict, in which consumption, peaceful investment, and military spending are endogenously determined. The analysis illustrates that when there is repeated interaction between nations, a game of threats and punishments generally will not support a disarmament outcome and that fluctuations in military spending can be an endogenous result of fluctuations in aggregate economic activity. Furthermore, the analysis shows how the relation between aggregate economic activity and military spending qualitatively depends on whether governments are acting opportunistically or cooperatively. Copyright 1990 by American Economic Association.
Researchers have identified naming and shaming as a strategy used by the international community to reprimand state leaders for their repressive actions. Previous research indicates that there is variation in the success of this tactic. One reason for the heterogeneity in success is that leaders with an interest in repressing opposition but avoiding international condemnation have adapted their behavior, at least partially, to avoid naming and shaming. For instance, some states choose to create and utilize alternative security apparatuses, such as pro-government militias (PGMs), to carry out these repressive acts. Creating or aligning with PGMs allows leaders to distance themselves from the execution of violence while reaping the rewards of repression. This analysis explores this dynamic. In particular, I examine how naming and shaming by Amnesty International and the United Nations Commission on Human Rights influences the creation of PGMs to skirt future international condemnation by the offending state for all states from 1986 to 2000. I find that countries are more likely to create PGMs, especially informal PGMs, after their human rights abuses have been put in the spotlight by the international community.
In Thailand, India, Libya, and elsewhere, governments arm the populace or call up volunteers in irregular armed groups despite the risks this entails. The widespread presence of these militias, outside the context of state failure, challenges the expectation that governments uniformly consolidate the tools of violence. Drawing on the logic of delegation, we resolve this puzzle by arguing that governments have multiple incentives to form armed groups with a recognized link to the state but outside of the regular security forces. Such groups offset coup risks as substitutes for unreliable regular forces. Similar to other public-private collaborations, they also complement the work of regular forces in providing efficiency and information gains. Finally, these groups distance the government from the controversial use of force. These traits suggest that militias are not simply a sign of failed states or a precursor to a national military, but an important component of security portfolios in many contexts. Using cross-national data (1981–2005), we find support for this mix of incentives. From the perspective of delegation, used to analyze organizational design, global accountability, and policy choices, the domestic and international incentives for governments to choose militias raise explicit governance and accountability issues for the international community.
Research on civil wars has recently shifted from an almost exclusive emphasis on highly aggregate, crossnational research designs to more disaggregated, subnational research designs (Kalyvas 2008).1 Most of the recent crop has tended to disaggregate on the basis of geographic locations or events, but a few researchers have turned their attention to individuals (e.g. Blattman and Annan 2006; Guichaoua 2010; Humphreys and Weinstein 2004, 2007, 2008; Mvukiyehe and Samii 2008; Mvukiyehe et al. 2007; Pugel 2006; Samii et al. 2009; Viterna 2006).
In the later decades of the 20th century, Africa plunged into political chaos. States failed, governments became predators, and citizens took up arms. In When Things Fell Apart, Robert H. Bates advances an explanation of state failure in Africa. In so doing, he not only plumbs the depths of the continent's late-century tragedy, but also the logic of political order and the foundations of the state. This book covers a wide range of territory by drawing on materials from Rwanda, Sudan, Liberia, and Congo. Written to be accessible to the general reader, it is nonetheless a must-read for scholars and policy makers concerned with political conflict and state failure.
Forecasting models of state-led mass killing are limited in their use of structural indicators, despite a large body of research that emphasizes the importance of agency and security repertoires in conditioning political violence. I seek to overcome these limitations by developing a theoretical and statistical framework that highlights the advantages of using pro-government militias (PGMs) as a predictive indicator in forecasting models of state-led mass killing. I argue that PGMs can lower the potential costs associated with mass killing for a regime faced with an internal threat, and might hence “tip the balance” in its favor. In estimating a series of statistical models and their receiver–operator characteristic curves to evaluate this hypothesis globally for the years 1981–2007, focusing on 270 internal threat episodes, I find robust support for my expectations: including PGM indicators in state-led mass killing models significantly improves their predictive strength. Moreover, these results hold even when coefficient estimates produced by in-sample data are used to predict state-led mass killing in cross-validation and out-of-sample data for the years 2008–2013. This study hence provides an introductory demonstration of the potential advantages of including security repertoires, in addition to structural factors, in forecasting models.
Why do regimes delegate authority over a territory to nonstate militias, in effect voluntarily sacrificing their monopoly over the use of violence? This article argues that two factors increase the probability of states delegating control to a proxy militia, namely, military purges and armed conflict. Military purges disrupt intelligence-gathering structures and the organizational capacity of the military. To counteract this disruption, military leaders subcontract the task of control and repression to allied militias that have the local intelligence skills necessary to manage the civilian population. This argument is conditioned by whether the state faces an armed insurgency in a given region since intelligence, control, and repression are needed most where the state is being challenged. This hypothesis is tested on unique data for all subnational regions within Myanmar during the period 1962 to 2010 and finds that proxy militias are more likely to be raised in conflict areas after military purges.
Many counterinsurgent tribal militias emerged during the second civil war in Southern Sudan. Existing studies give the impression that formation of these groups was largely a top-down process. Focusing on the rise of the Fertit militia and relying on a series of in-depth interviews with tribal leaders, this article challenges that assumption. The article shows that the emergence of the Fertit militia was principally a grassroots phenomenon stemming from local tensions and conflicts. The article discusses the wider applicability of these insights and, generally, proposes a more nuanced approach to the study of counterinsurgent militia formation. The approach suggests simultaneous attention to state interventions and local interactions.
African regimes' repressive strategies changed during the post-1989 wave of democratization. Conventional methods of coercion--targeting of the opposition by the official security forces--were insufficient and costly in multiparty regimes. Democratization enfranchised the opposition and broadened the range of political challengers to include rural constituencies and entire ethnic groups. Furthermore, human rights abuses raised the threat of international sanctions at a much lower threshold than during the cold war. Rulers in Kenya and Rwanda responded by privatizing state violence. Privatized repression allowed them to neutralize widespread challenges, while distancing themselves from political violence to minimize friction with aid donors.
This article analyses the steps taken by the Russian government, with the aid of a powerful local clan, the so-called Kadyrovtsy, to subdue the Chechen insurgency. It highlights the strategy used by Russia, under whose patronage former anti-Russian guerrilla fighters were transformed into paramilitary allies of the Russian government; later these former insurgents were incorporated into the regular Russian army and other state security forces. The article also identifies problems that are connected with the activities of the Kadyrovtsy in Chechnya and Russia, and the spillover into the diaspora; it also contextualises the issues faced by the contemporary Chechen ruling clan and the geopolitics of the Caucasus within the research framework of paramilitarism and counterinsurgency.
Given the onset of a violent rebellion by an armed non-state group, how do states re-establish intra-state peace and hence fulfill their basic function as providers of internal security? In this article I argue that one way governments perform this core function is by recruiting non-combatants into local self-defense units called civilian defense forces (CDFs). By providing for local security, leveraging their superior local knowledge, and provoking insurgent reprisals against civilians, CDF units facilitate the influx of tactical intelligence as well as isolate insurgents from non-combatant populations physically as well as politically. Consistent with the argument, statistical analyses of two different cross-national data sets of insurgencies from 1944 to 2006 reveal that a state is 53 percent more likely to vanquish a guerrilla threat if the incumbent deploys CDFs. The analyses also cast doubt on a recent claim in the literature that incumbent force mechanization adversely affects the states’ ability to counter insurgent threats. Given that CDF deployment is a more easily manipulable variable than most other elements of state power, CDFs appear to be an effective instrument of counterinsurgency deserving of further academic and policy attention.
The study of ethnicity is dominated by constructivist approaches, yet empirical studies of civil war have been oblivious to their insights. In this article, the author examines the relationship between ethnic identity and civil war and points to several empirical instances of fluidity in the behavioral expression of ethnic identities within civil war. The author identifies two processes that are consistent with constructivist theorizing: identity shift and ethnic defection. The author provides several empirical illustrations along with a micro-level test of the determinants of ethnic defection. At the micro level, ethnic defection is best predicted by the extent of territorial control exercised by the incumbent political actor and the level of prior insurgent violence. The author also hypothesizes that at the macro level, ethnic defection is a function of the resources available to incumbent actors and conclude by stressing the need to take seriously the endogenous dynamics of civil wars.
This article examines the ways and means in which states employ irregular and indigenous personnel in a counter-insurgency (COIN) or counter-terrorist (CT) campaign, in the historical and contemporary context. The authors clarify the terminology surrounding this neglected area of COIN/CT theory, and identify four types of indigenous assistance – individual actors (trackers, interpreters, informers and agents); home guards and militias; counter-gangs; and pseudo-gangs. This article concludes that while the use of such indigenous irregulars has its advantages for the state and its armed/security forces (particularly as far as intelligence, local knowledge and undermining the insurgent's cause is concerned), it can also have serious practical and ethical implications for a COIN/CT campaign, and can have unexpected and unwelcome consequences including violations of laws of armed conflict, the undermining of governmental authority and the prospects of endemic internal strife and state collapse.
Why did violence decline in Iraq in 2007? Many policymakers and scholars credit the "surge," or the program of U.S. reinforcements and doctrinal changes that began in January 2007. Others cite the voluntary insurgent stand-downs of the Sunni Awakening or say that the violence had simply run its course with the end of a wave of sectarian cleansing; still others credit an interaction between the surge and the Awakening. The difference matters for policy and scholarship, yet this debate has not moved from hypothesis to test. An assessment of the competing claims based on recently declassified data on violence at local levels and information gathered from seventy structured interviews with coalition participants finds little support for the cleansing or Awakening theses. Instead, a synergistic interaction between the surge and the Awakening was required for violence to drop as quickly and widely as it did: both were necessary; neither was sufficient. U.S. policy thus played an important role in reducing the violence in Iraq in 2007, but Iraq provides no evidence that similar methods will produce similar results elsewhere without local equivalents of the Sunni Awakening.
Will a strategy change toward one of “hearts and minds” alter the eventual outcome of the American-led allied war effort in Afghanistan? We investigate this question by analyzing 66 cases of counterinsurgency warfare from the twentieth century in which a foreign power seeks to defend a central authority in a state or colonial territory against an insurgency. We identify whether and when a foreign power implemented a change in its counterinsurgency strategy, whether said change involved a shift toward a strategy reflecting a hearts and minds emphasis, as well as the foreign power's eventual success or failure in prevailing over insurgents. We find that while shifting toward a strategy of hearts and minds increases the chances for success, the improvement is modest and requires nearly a decade to produce. Furthermore, we find that the impact of a strategy change is conditional on the timing of the change, with a “window of opportunity” associated with success closing after approximately eight years of war. Our findings bode poorly for allied efforts in contemporary Afghanistan.
Transitions to multiparty politics occurred throughout Sub-Saharan Africa
with remarkable speed in the early 1990s, linking the region to the broader
‘third wave of democratisation’ which, from 1974, progressively marked
many areas of southern Europe, Latin America and post-communist Europe.
Unlike most earlier cases of political reform, however, the changes in Sub-Saharan Africa demonstrated a strong external orientation. A unique combination
of donor pressure, internal opposition and ‘snowballing’ led
regimes to rapidly introduce multiparty politics regardless of whether ruling
elites in fact supported democratisation. The particular constraints
surrounding these transitions place much of Sub-Saharan Africa at high risk
of civil violence. Drawing on the cases of Cameroon, Rwanda and Kenya,
this article argues that, during transitional periods, the greater the conflict
between ruling elites and opposition forces, and the greater the pressure
which regimes face to proceed with reform, the greater the likelihood that
states will sponsor ‘informal repression’, covert violations by third parties, to
regain political control.
Despite the fact that the Shining Path guerrilla movement in Peru enjoyed initial peasant support, the emergence and spread of rondas campesinas or self-defence committees in the Andean highlands of Ayacucho was principally a response against coercion and violence exerted by Shining Path against the very same peasantry. This article seeks to demonstrate that the ronda phenomenon must be understood as part of the complex changes brought about by the proliferation of violence in the Peruvian Andes. The spread of rondas campesinas cannot be reduced to a mere counterinsurgent strategy imposed by the security forces on the rural communities; communal initiative and peasant ‘agency’ were, at certain stages, at least as important. Only with the rise to power of Fujimori were the self-defence committees formally incorporated in the state’s anti-guerrilla strategy. Subsequently, with the reduction in the level of violence, self-defence committees have been seeking new roles in relation to the challenges of re-civilianisation and reconstruction.
Does ethnicity matter for explaining violence during civil wars? I exploit variation in the identity of soldiers who conducted so-called “sweep” operations (zachistki) in Chechnya (2000–5) as an empirical strategy for testing the link between ethnicity and violence. Evidence suggests that the intensity and timing of insurgent attacks are conditional on who “swept” a particular village. For example, attacks decreased by about 40% after pro-Russian Chechen sweeps relative to similar Russian-only operations. These changes are difficult to reconcile with notions of Chechen solidarity or different tactical choices. Instead, evidence, albeit tentative, points toward the existence of a wartime “coethnicity advantage.” Chechen soldiers, enmeshed in dense intraethnic networks, are better positioned to identify insurgents within the population and to issue credible threats against civilians for noncooperation. A second mechanism - prior experience as an insurgent - may also be at work. These findings suggest new avenues of research investigating the conditional effects of violence in civil wars.
This book describes the theory structure underlying contests, in which players expend effort and/or spend money in trying to get ahead of one another. Uniquely, this effort is sunk and cannot be recovered, regardless of whether a player wins or loses in the competition. Such interactions include diverse phenomena such as marketing and advertising by firms, litigation, relative reward schemes in firms, political competition, patent races, sports, military combat, war and civil war. These have been studied in the field of contest theory both within these specific contexts and at a higher level of abstraction. The purpose of this book is to describe the fundamental common properties of these types of interactions and to uncover some common properties or laws that govern them. The book begins by describing the properties of static contests and tournaments. Aspects such as timing, entry, sabotage and delegation are added and contest design issues such as the admission or exclusion of players and the structure of prizes are discussed. Further, structures are analysed in which players interact repeatedly in the same or different contest environments. Examples are inter-group conflict followed by intra-group rivalry, elimination tournaments and other dynamic contest structures.
The rent-seeking competitions studied by economists fall within a much broader category of conflict interactions that also includes military combats, election campaigns, industrial disputes, lawsuits, and sibling rivalries. In the rent-seeking literature, each party's success pi (which can be interpreted either as the probability of victory or as the proportion of the prize won) has usually been taken to be a function of the ratio of the respective resource commitments. Alternatively, however, pi may instead be a function of the difference between the parties' commitments to the contest. The Contest Success Function (CSF) for the difference from is a logistic curve in which, as is consistent with military experience, increasing returns apply up to an inflection point at equal resource commitments. A crucial flaw of the traditional ratio model is that neither onesided submission nor two-sided peace between the parties can ever occur as a Cournot equilibrium. In contrast, both of these outcomes are entirely consistent with a model in which success is a function of the difference between the parties' resource commitments.
Most nations have experienced an internal armed conflict since 1960. The past decade has witnessed an explosion of research into the causes and consequences of civil wars, belatedly bringing the topic into the economics mainstream. This article critically reviews this interdisciplinary literature and charts productive paths forward. Formal theory has focused on a central puzzle: why do civil wars occur at all when, given the high costs of war, groups have every incentive to reach an agreement that avoids fighting? Explanations have focused on information asymmetries and the inability to sign binding contracts in the absence of the rule of law. Economic theory has made less progress, however, on the thornier (but equally important) problems of why armed groups form and cohere, and why individuals decide to fight. Likewise, the actual behavior of armed organizations and their leaders is poorly understood. On the empirical side, a vast cross-country econometric literature has aimed to identify the causes of civil war. While most work is plagued by econometric identification problems, low per capita incomes, slow economic growth and geographic conditions favoring insurgency are the factors most robustly linked to civil war. We argue that micro-level analysis and data are needed to truly decipher war’s causes, and understand the recruitment, organization, and conduct of armed groups. Recent advances in this area are highlighted. Finally, turning to the economic legacies of war, we frame the literature in terms of neoclassical economic growth theory. Emerging stylized facts include the ability of some economies to experience rapid macroeconomic recoveries, while certain human capital impacts appear more persistent. Yet econometric identification has not been adequately addressed, and there is little consensus on the most effective policies to avert conflicts or promote postwar recovery. The evidence is weakest where it is arguably most important: in understanding c
Tournaments, conflict, and rent-seeking have been modelled as contests in which participants exert effort to increase their probability of winning a prize. A Contest Success Function (CSF) provides each player's probability of winning as a function of all players' efforts. In this paper the additive CSF employed in most contests is axiomatized, with an independence from irrelevant alternatives property as the key axiom. Two frequently used functional forms are also axiomatized: one in which winning probabilities depend on the ratio of players' efforts and the other in which winning probabilities depend on the difference in efforts.
During the nineteenth century, states routinely defeated insurgent foes. Over the twentieth century, however, this pattern reversed itself, with states increasingly less likely to defeat insurgents or avoid meeting at least some of their demands. What accounts for this pattern of outcomes in counterinsurgency (COIN) wars? We argue that increasing mechanization within state militaries after World War I is primarily responsible for this shift. Unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors, modern militaries possess force structures that inhibit information collection among local populations. This not only complicates the process of sifting insurgents from noncombatants but increases the difficulty of selectively applying rewards and punishment among the fence-sitting population. Modern militaries may therefore inadvertently fuel, rather than deter, insurgencies. We test this argument with a new data set of 286 insurgencies (1800 2004). We find that higher levels of mechanization, along with external support for insurgents and the counterinsurgent's status as an occupier, are associated with an increased probability of state defeat. By contrast, we find only partial support for conventional power- and regime-based explanations, and no support for the view that rough terrain favors insurgent success.
Individuals, groups, or nations — if rational and self-interested — will be balancing on the margin between two alternative ways of generating income: (1) “peaceful” production and exchange, versus (2) ‘appropriative” efforts designed to seize resources previously controlled by others (or to defend against such invasions). Both production and appropriation, on the assumption here, are entirely normal lines of activity engaged in to the extent that doing so seems profitable. The general-equilibrium steady-state model involves a resource partition function, a social production function, a combat power function, and an income distribution equation. Solutions were obtained under thesymmetrical Cournot protocol and two alternativeasymmetrical assumptions: the familiar Stackelberg condition and a more novel hierarchical protocol called Threat-and-Promise. The analysis demonstrates that, in contrast with the harmonistic bias of orthodox economic theory, a general-equilibrium model can also encompass the hostile and destructive interactions that characterize real-world social relations.
Militias and Genocide
- Alvarez A.