Inclusive Institutions and the Onset of Internal Conflict in Resource-rich Countries

The literature on institutional determinants of intra-state violence commonly asserts that the presence of multiple political parties reduces the conflict potential within countries; by co-opting oppositional groups into an institutionalized political arena, dissidents would prefer parliamentarian means over violent rebellion in order to pursue their goals. The present paper shows that this proposition does not necessarily hold for fuel-abundant states. In the presence of natural resources such as oil or gas, countries exhibiting numerous non-competitive parties are actually more susceptible to internal conflict. Fortified by the establishment of legal political parties, regime opponents succumb more easily to the prospects of securing resource revenues, adopting rapacious behaviour. Fuel-related internal grievances as well as the opposition’s disaffection over the lack of effective political leverage and government use of political violence provide a seemingly legitimate motive for armed rebellion. Moreover, financial means for insurgency are raised by extortion or the possibility of selling future exploitation rights to natural resources. Logit models using different estimation techniques and alternative operationalizations corroborate the proposed claim. The argumentation is further illustrated by a depiction of the Colombian case.intra-state conflict, natural resources, political parties, democracy, Colombia

Social capital, growth and poverty: a survey of cross-country evidence

This chapter surveys the major contributions to the rapidly growing empirical literature on social capital and economic performance, focusing primarily on cross-country approaches. It first addresses characteristics of governments that fall under broad definitions of the term social capital. It then reviews studies of “civil,” or nongovernmental, social capital. Most of this literature explores the determinants of growth in per capita income, devoting no attention to distributional effects. This chapter is a preliminary attempt to fill that gap by providing new cross-country evidence on the effects of social capital on poverty and the distribution of income. This chapter is limited primarily to cross-country studies of social capital and economic performance. It does not attempt to comprehensively review regional-, village-, or individual-level analysis or the expanding literature on social capital’s impact on noneconomic outcomes, such as health, education, or crime. Nor does it examine the rapidly growing body of work that explores the determinants of social capital.social capital, development, trust, norms

A Phoenix in Flames? Portfolio Choice and Violence in Civil War in Rural Burundi

This paper challenges the idea that farmers revert to subsistence farming when confronted with violence from civil war. Macro-economic evidence on economic legacies of civil war suggests that civil wars, while obviously disastrous in the short run, do not need to have persistent effects on long term economic outcomes. New micro-level studies are ambiguous about the impact of civil war for welfare. Several studies find long lasting negative effects, particularly through reduced human capital formation while others for example report increased participation in collective action programs and the emergence of local institutions. We investigate to what extend individual incentives for investments are affected by civil war. Using several rounds of (panel) data at the farm and community level, we find that farmers in Burundi who are confronted with civil war violence in their home communities increase export and cash crop growing activities, invest more in public goods, and reveal higher levels of subjective welfare evaluations. We interpret this in the light of similar recent micro-level evidence that points to post-traumatic growth effects after (civil) war fare. Our results are confirmed across specifications as well as in robustness analyses

Confronting Wartime Sexual Violence: Public Support for Survivors in Bosnia

Existing research on conflict-related sexual violence focuses on the motivations of perpetrators and effects on survivors. What remains less clear is how postconflict societies respond to the hardships survivors face. In survey experiments in Bosnia, we examine public support for financial aid, legal aid, and public recognition for survivors. First, we find a persistent ethnocentric view of sexual violence, where respondents are less supportive when the perpetrator is identified as co-ethnic and survivors are perceived as out-groups. Second, respondents are less supportive of male survivors than female survivors, which we attribute to social stigmas surrounding same-gender sexual activity. Consistent with our argument, those who are intolerant of homosexuality are especially averse to providing aid to male survivors. This study points to the long-term challenges survivors face due to ethnic divisions and social stigmatization from sexual violence

Capital controls re-examined: the case for ‘smart’ controls

The global financial crisis which began in east Asia in 1997 is not over, neither is the inquest into its implications for adjustment policy. In the wake of this crisis, we focus here on the role of capital controls, which formed a much publicised part of the crisis-coping strategy in one country (Malaysia) and, less openly, were also deployed by other crisis-afflicted countries. Evaluation so far has examined different target variables with different estimation methods, generally concentrating on efficiency and stability indicators and ignoring equity measures; it has also typically treated `control´ as a one-zero dummy variable, ignoring the `quality´ of intervention and in particular the extent to which efficiency gains are obtained in exchange for controls. Partly because of these limitations, the literature has reached no consensus on the impact of controls, nor therefore about where they fit within the set of post-crisis defence mechanisms. We propose an approach in which the government plays off short-term political security against long-term economic gain; the more insecure its political footing, the greater the weight it gives to political survival, which is likely to increase the probability of controls being imposed. The modelling of this approach generates a governmental `policy reaction function´ and an impact function for controls, which are estimated by simultaneous panel-data methods across a sample of thirty developing and transitional countries between 1980-2003, using, for the period since 1996, the `new´ IMF dataset which differentiates between controls by type. We find that controls appear to cause increases in income equality, and are significantly associated with political insecurity and relatively low levels of openness to trade. They do not, in our analysis, materially influence the level of whole-economy productivity or GDP across the sample of countries examined, although they do influence productivity in particular sectors, in particular manufacturing. But the dispersion around this central finding is wide: the tendency for controls to depress productivity by encouraging rent-seeking sometimes is, and sometimes is not, counteracted by purposive government policy actions to maintain competitiveness. Whether or not this happens – whether, as we put it, controls are `smart´, and the manner in which they are smartened - is vital, on both efficiency and equity grounds. We devise a formula for, and make the case for capital controls which are time-limited, and contain an inbuilt incentive to increased productivity, as a means of improving the sustainability and equity of the adjustment process whilst keeping to a minimum the cost in terms of productive efficiency

The civilizing process in London’s Old Bailey

The jury trial is a critical point where the state and its citizens come together to define the limits of acceptable behavior. Here we present a large-scale quantitative analysis of trial transcripts from the Old Bailey that reveal a major transition in the nature of this defining moment. By coarse-graining the spoken word testimony into synonym sets and dividing the trials based on indictment, we demonstrate the emergence of semantically distinct violent and nonviolent trial genres. We show that although in the late 18th century the semantic content of trials for violent offenses is functionally indistinguishable from that for nonviolent ones, a long-term, secular trend drives the system toward increasingly clear distinctions between violent and nonviolent acts. We separate this process into the shifting patterns that drive it, determine the relative effects of bureaucratic change and broader cultural shifts, and identify the synonym sets most responsible for the eventual genre distinguishability. This work provides a new window onto the cultural and institutional changes that accompany the monopolization of violence by the state, described in qualitative historical analysis as the civilizing process

Was there discrimination in the distribution of resources after the earthquake in Gujarat? Imagination, epistemology, and the state in western India

In this paper, I analyse and reason with the patterns of discrimination evident in the reconstruction initiatives following the 2001 earthquake in Gujarat. I do so in order to explain what discrimination there was, and how and why such discrimination was related to broader patterns of social polarisation. After the earthquake, the political state of Gujarat made the headlines following widespread violence in 2002. This led to a flurry of publications in which anger and indignation led to the over-statement of the links between the government, social life in the state, and the politics of religious (Hindu-Muslim) communalism. This paper is an attempt to chip away to the impression thus created of a land consumed only by the violent compulsions of Hindu nationalism. I do so not through polemic, but ethnography, as a way of suggesting it is simply wrong to conflate state complicity in the anti-Muslim violence of 2002 with all other routine operations performed by government. Given Gujarat’s reputation for Hindu nationalism, my analysis unsurprisingly confirms the scholarship of others by showing how some powerful Hindu-oriented non-governmental organisations have drawn power and resources away from the state to parade before the people as if they govern. However, more importantly, the ethnography of the mixed-fortunes of Muslims in the rubble also illustrates some of the limits to the power of the Hindu nationalists: the data shows that the Hindu nationalists have not hijacked the state in its entirety and their influence is clearly curtailed and imperfect. By clothing the Hindu nationalist in unassailably powerful terms, the academic critic, I argue, has paradoxically almost become culpable in the success of the nationalist, by conferring on their rhetoric the status of reality, and on them power

Socioeconomic, Institutional & Political Determinants of Human Rights Abuse: A Subnational Study of India, 1993-2002

We conduct an econometric analysis of socioeconomic, institutional and political factors determining government respect for human rights within India. Using time series crosssectional data for 28 Indian states for the period 1993 ñ 2002, we find that internal threat poised by number of social violence events, presence of civil war and riot hit disturbed areas are strongly associated with human rights abuses. Amongst socioeconomic factors, ëexclusiveí economic growth, ëunevení development, poor social development spending,youth bulges and differential growth rates between minority religious groups explain the likelihood of human rights violations. Capturing power at the state and central level by Hindu national partiesí viz., Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Shiv Sena, further help understand the incidence of human rights violations within India. We also address the possible endogenity problem between human development and human rights. Using a system of simultaneous equation, we find that improvement in human development have positive impact on government respect for human rights within India.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64388/1/wp926.pd

Iran‘s Oil Wealth: Treasure and Trouble for the Shah‘s Regime. A Context-sensitive Analysis of the Ambivalent Impact of Resource Abundance

The Iranian revolution still appears to be a puzzle for theoretical approaches linking political instability and/or violent conflict to the resource wealth of a country. It therefore works well as a case study for the purposes of this paper: to show the necessity of a broader approach to the resource-violence link and to highlight the “context approach.” The focus is on the violence that accompanied the events preceding the revolution, and also on the fact that this violence was mainly exercised by the rulers and—excluding the activities of militant groups—only very randomly by the masses. Many relevant contextual conditions had an impact on the downfall of the shah’s regime: demographic (population growth, urbanization) and cultural factors (religious tradition, national identity); the vivid memory of several historical events; the personal preferences of central actors— mainly both the shahs—which in combination brought the country to an impasse; and the religious opposition to the regime. But upon closer examination, it becomes clear that many of those factors were influenced by resource-specific conditions such as the amount and the use of oil income, sudden oil-price drops, and external interference aimed mainly at the domination of the oil sector. It was the specific interplay of these and other contextual conditions—as much resource-specific as general, and both within the country and on an international scale—that finally brought about the downfall of the regime.Iran, oil, revolution, resource curse, rentier state theory, context approach