Alexander De Juan

The Ba‘athist blackout? Selective goods provision and political violence in the Syrian civil war

Many authoritarian regimes selectively provide critical segments of the population with privileged access to goods and services, expecting political support in return. This article is interested in the effects of this regime strategy: Is violent opposition less likely to occur in subnational regions bound to the ruling elite through such patron–client networks? For its empirical analysis, the article makes use of crowdsourcing data on the number and geospatial distribution of fatalities in the Syrian civil war from March 2011 to November 2012. In terms of selective goods provision, the focus is on the electricity sector. Satellite images of the earth at night are used to proxy spatial variations in the public distribution of electricity in times of power shortages. These data are complemented with information from the last Syrian population census of 2004. Estimations from fixed effect logit models lend support to the hypothesis that the risk of violence has been lower in subdistricts that have been favored by the ruling regime in terms of preferential access to material goods. This hypothesis is further corroborated with qualitative evidence from Syrian localities.

Civil war violence and political trust: microlevel evidence from Nepal

Exposure to violence can shape people’s political and social perceptions. War-time effects on trust in state institutions are particularly relevant for political stability in the aftermath of violent conflict. If people distrust the state, they are less likely to endorse reform plans, will be less inclined to comply with state rules and regulations, and may uphold support for challengers of state authority. Our paper contributes to the understanding of the role of violence for trust in the national government. We use high-quality, geo-referenced survey data, joined with village-level information on civil war casualties, to estimate the effects of exposure to violence on political trust in Nepal. We find that exposure to violence matters for reducing trust in the national government. This association seems to be mainly driven by effects of violence at the outbreak of the conflict as well as at the end of the civil war period under investigation. These findings shed new light on the complex associations between exposure to violence and political trust.

Extraction and Violent Resistance in the Early Phases of State Building : Quantitative Evidence From the "Maji Maji" Rebellion, 1905-1907

Does extraction increase the likelihood of antistate violence in the early phases of state-building processes? Although research has focused on the impacts of war on state building, the potential “...Does extraction increase the likelihood of antistate violence in the early phases of state-building processes? Although research has focused on the impacts of war on state building, the potential “war-making effects” of extraction have largely been neglected. The article provides the first quantitative analysis of these effects in the context of colonial state building. It focuses on the “Maji Maji” rebellion (1905-1907), the most substantial incidence of anticolonial violence in Eastern Africa. Analyses based on a new historical data set confirm the correlation between extraction and resistance. More importantly, they reveal that distinct strategies of extraction produced distinct outcomes. Although the intensification of extraction in state-held areas created grievances among the population, it did not drive the rebellion. Rather, the results indicate that the expansion of extractive authority threatened the interests of local elites and provoked effective resistance. This finding provides insights into the mechanisms driving the “extraction–coercion cycle” of state building.

The Pacifying Effects of Local Religious Institutions : An Analysis of Communal Violence in Indonesia

This paper tests whether local religious institutions have a dampening effect on the probability of communal violence. It argues that a dense layer of institutions strengthens horizontal and vertical contacts and networks within religious communities. Horizontal linkages help to bridge social, economic, and ethnic divisions. Vertical contacts enable religious leaders to stay informed about communal grievances among their followers and to coordinate conflict resolution attempts. In our analysis of more than 60,000 villages in Indonesia, we are able to document a statistically significant and substantively meaningful negative effect of the density of local religious institutions on the probability of mass fighting. This effect is robust to the inclusion of an exhaustive list of confounding variables and alternative measures of violence. We present additional evidence that this pacifying effect of religious institutions is weaker or absent in conflicts that evolve along explicitly religious cleavages.

The Role of Intra-Religious Conflicts in Intrastate Wars

Many civil wars are fought between members of different religious communities. It seems plausible to focus on these communities’ interrelations to identify the causal factors responsible for the escalating effects that religion can have in such conflicts. A closer look, however, reveals that processes within religious communities can be crucial in influencing the role religions play in intrastate wars. Within single communities, factions of religious elites compete for material and dogmatic supremacy. Such intra-religious conflicts can motivate religious elites to search for support from political allies to prevail over their religious rivals. In return, they legitimize their political patrons’ claims for political power and their violent campaigns against members of other religious communities. Thus, intra-religious conflicts can effectively contribute to the religious escalation of intrastate wars between different religious communities. This argument is exemplified with reference to conflicts in Thaila...

Manpower to coerce and co-opt--State capacity and political violence in southern Sudan 2006-2010

This paper investigates the role of state capacity for political violence. Most previous studies have suffered from inadequacies of country-level data, questionable validity of indicators or theoretical shortcomings. This paper aims at overcoming some of these challenges. We focus on one specific aspect of state capacity: the role of governmental manpower. We argue that its subnational effect on political violence follows a non-linear, inverted-U shape. We investigate this hypothesis in the context of southern Sudan, covering the period from 2006 to 2010. We use unique data on the geographical distribution of public personnel across 75 southern Sudanese counties. The data are matched with geocoded data on violent events as well as various socio-economic indicators. Our fixed-effects estimations indicate that particularly low or high levels of state capacity are associated with low levels of violence. Counties with intermediate numbers of state personnel experience the highest numbers of violent events.

Social Inequality, State-centered Grievances, and Protest: Evidence from South Africa

What role does horizontal social inequality play for political protest in middle-income countries? We argue that public social service provision is an important driver of state perceptions. When a state fails to deliver services in an equitable manner, trust in institutions erodes and protest becomes more likely. We use a mixed methods design to investigate this argument in South Africa. First, we combine police event records with census data to estimate correlations between service inequality and protests. Second, we draw on an opinion survey with 27,000 respondents to investigate the suggested mechanism linking social inequality to protest through political attitudes. Third, we focus on qualitative protest accounts in two areas identified by a matching approach to assess the plausibility of our quantitative findings. Throughout these analyses, we document a robust association between horizontal social inequality and protest.

The Comparative Politics of Colonialism and Its Legacies: An Introduction

What are the causes and consequences of colonial rule? This introduction to the special issue “Comparative Politics of Colonialism and Its Legacies” surveys recent literature in political science, sociology, and economics that addresses colonial state building and colonial legacies. Past research has made important contributions to our understanding of colonialism’s long-term effects on political, social, and economic development. Existing work emphasizes the role of critical junctures and institutions in understanding the transmission of those effects to present-day outcomes and embraces the idea of design-based inference for empirical analysis. The four articles of this special issue add to existing research but also represent new research trends: increased attention to (1) the internal dynamics of colonial intervention; (2) noninstitutional transmission mechanisms; (3) the role of context conditions at times of colonial intervention; and (4) a finer-grained disaggregation of outcomes, explanatory factors, and units of analysis.

Constructing the State: Macro Strategies, Micro Incentives, and the Creation of Police Forces in Colonial Namibia

How do states build a security apparatus after violent resistance against state rule? This article argues that in early periods of state building two main factors shape the process: the macro-strategic goals of the state and administrative challenges of personnel management. These dynamics are studied in the context of the establishment of police forces in the settler colony of German Southwest Africa, present-day Namibia. The empirical analysis relies on information about the location of police stations and a near full census of police forces, compiled from the German Federal Archives. A mismatch is found between the allocation of police presence and the allocation of police personnel. The first was driven by the strategic value of locations in terms of extractive potential, political importance, and the presence of critical infrastructure, whereas the allocation of individual officers was likely affected by adverse selection, which led to the assignment of low-quality recruits to strategically important locations.

Framing Political Violence: Success and Failure of Religious Mobilization in the Philippines and Thailand

How do religious civil wars evolve? Many violent conflicts are fought between groups of different faiths. The paper argues, however, that religious differences rarely directly lead to conflict onset. Rather, the apparent religious dimension of many civil wars is a consequence of successful religious framing. Political and military leaders offer religious interpretations designed to legitimize the use of force and to mobilize believers to violent action. Such framing processes can be more or less successful, depending inter alia on the authority of the political and religious leadership, on the coherence and appropriateness of the frames, on the existence of persuasive counter-frames, and on the availability of communication infrastructures that allow for effective dissemination of religious frames. Comparing violent conflicts in the Philippines and Thailand, the paper shows that religious mobilization can fail along the theoretically predicted lines.