Topher L. McDougal

Insurgent Violence and the Rural–Urban Divide: The Case of Maoist India

Purpose – Rural–urban divides characterize many violent internecine conflicts. The lack of rural development is often cited as an underlying structural cause of this phenomenon, and thus strengthening rural–urban linkages is often touted as a way of dismantling the structural conditions for internecine violence. This chapter attempts to identify how both the strength and the form of rural–urban linkages influence the intensity of insurgent violence. Methodology – Using geographic information systems, this chapter analyzes the intensity of specific violent attacks by rural insurgent groups in Maoist India as a function of rural–urban linkages and transportation network redundancy. Findings – It finds that the degree of interconnectivity in transportation networks is a more robust determinant of restraint among violent actors than the sheer strength of rural–urban linkages. Production networks characterized by highly networked road systems are more likely to incent restrained behavior among rebel groups, which may be dependent on taxation or extortion through obstruction. Limitations/implications – The chapter quantitatively analyzes a phenomenon, but does not identify causal mechanisms driving it. The policy implication is that providing transportation infrastructure within rural areas may be a more effective guard against insurgent violence than connecting urban and rural areas. Originality – The chapter makes a methodologically unique link between the large existing literature on rural–urban linkages, and the growing literature on trade networks in violent conflict.

Law of the landless : the Dalit bid for land redistribution in Gujarat, India

Tenuous land access contributes to food and livelihood insecurity, and fuels conflicts in many rural societies. In such cases, the ability of government legal institutions to structure and ultimately transform the conflict depends not just on the adoption of laws favorable to progressive land redistribution, but also the effective implementation of those laws in the face of elite influence in local government. This paper presents a case study of an identity-based social movement for Outcastes in India (the Navsarjan Trust) struggling to bring about the successful implementation of land redistribution laws in Gujarat, India. I contend the Dalit land movement recognizes outcomes of state policy as products of caste struggles within a nested hierarchy of local government institutions. I argue Navsarjan’s strategy is to modify the strength of links between levels in this hierarchy in order to produce favorable results for the Dalit land rights movement. This strategy explodes the myth of human rights movements as necessarily antagonistic to government function, portraying government rather as a framework that structures social struggle.

Predation and Production in a Core-Periphery Model: A Note

Rural-urban divides have characterized recent violent insurgencies around the world, but there are important differences in dynamics: sometimes rural insurgents target cities and sometimes not; sometimes the combat frontier is blurry, other times neat. This paper attempts to construct a simple model of the rural-urban relationship in conflict to understand when predators will attempt to prey on cities, versus when they remain in the hinterlands. It takes Krugman’s (1991) core-periphery model as a starting point, in which there are just two regions, A and B (perhaps rural and urban), and two sectors. However, the model is modified such that the sectors are not “manufacturing” and “agriculture,” but rather production and predation, after Hirshleifer (1991), which can both occur in either or both regions. It finds that at middling levels of predation and/or high transportation costs, rural predatory actors will target cities. At high levels of predation and/or low transportation costs, however, multiple stable equilibria may arise, creating disincentives for rural predatory actors to target cities.

The Effect of Farmer-Pastoralist Violence on State-level Internal Revenue Generation in Nigeria A Modified Synthetic Control Analysis Approach

Nigeria’s ethnically and religiously diverse Middle Belt has experienced recurrent eruptions of violence over the past several decades. Disputes between pastoralists and farmers arise from disagreements over access to farmland, grazing areas, stock routes, and water points for both animals and households. Although relatively low in intensity, this form of violence is widespread, persistent, and arguably increasing in its incidence. This study seeks to answer the question: How has farmer-pastoralist conflict affected state internally-generated revenues (IGR)? The literature on the effect of violence on sub-national fiscal capacity is slim to none. We use a synthetic control approach to model how IGR for four conflict-affected states – Benue, Kaduna, Nasarawa, and Plateau – would have developed in the absence of violence. To account for the endogeneity criticism commonly leveled at such synthetic control analyses, we then use a fixed-effects IVmodel to estimate IGR losses predicted by the synthetic control analysis as a function of farmer-pastoralist fatalities. Our conservative estimates for percentage reduction to annual state IGR growth for the four states are 0%, 1.2%, 2.6%, and 12.1% respectively, implying that IGR is likely much more sensitive to conflict than GDP. In total, the four study states of Benue, Kaduna, Nasarawa, and Plateau are estimated to have lost between US

Ammunition Leakage From The Military To Civilian Markets: Market Price Evidence From Haiti, 2004 - 2012

719,000 and US

The Trilemma of Promoting Economic Justice at War’s End

2.3 million in 2010 US dollars, or 22–47% of their potential IGR collection during the period of intense.

Wartime Violence and Post-Conflict Political Mobilization in Mozambique

ABSTRACT The increase in the accessibility of firearms and ammunition represents a key factor of destabilization in many countries. It is also commonly associated with an escalation in intensity and organization of collective and interpersonal violence. In some cases, arms are illegally transferred via diversion from existing stores. In this article, we consider the leakage from military to civilian markets as an important source of ammunition available to civilians in Haiti. We employ a unique section-quarterly panel of ammunition prices on the Haitian civilian market over the period July 2004–July 2012. These data are combined with publicly available monthly data on authorized ammunition shipments to the country registered by the United Nations (UN) and Haitian National Police (HNP). We use a standard time-series Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) model to show that the exogenous shocks of UN- and HNP-ordered ammunition exert measurable downward pressure on civilian ammunition markets, which we calculate in terms of adjusted predictions and partial elasticities of demand. These effects constitute econometric evidence that the firewall that should in theory have separated military and civilian markets in Haiti partially broke down. We conclude with a suggestion for using this model to help estimate the specific size of the leakage.

The Effect of Farmer-Pastoralist Violence on Income: New Survey Evidence from Nigeria’s Middle Belt States

Should transitional justice mechanisms be informed by agendas of economic justice and, if so, what should the state’s role be in forwarding those agendas? There is a growing consensus within the international community that the larger peacebuilding project, as well as the sub-project of transitional justice, are not sustainable enterprises in the absence of strong national institutions. Hence, an interest in “statebuilding,” without which policy goals like economic liberalization and democratization might have perverse effects. But among the many contradictions inherent in the statebuilding process is the possibility that the state you have helped to build may exercise its growing sovereignty by enacting policies that do not seem supportive of political or economic liberalization—the very policy goals that convinced the international community to support statebuilding in the first place. Providing intellectual scaffolding for engaging these questions, this chapter contends that post-conflict and transitional countries face a policy trilemma that threatens their sovereignty—sovereignty that is ultimately important for ensuring a measure of economic justice in the post-conflict context. After reviewing a selection of key findings from the conflict economics literature yielding relevant suggestions for economic and development agendas in transitional societies, this chapter argues that transitional justice must be better integrated into the formulation and implementation of post-conflict development policy. It concludes with the suggestion that transitional justice mechanisms involve forms of democratic engagement that could procedurally improve national economic sovereignty, internal cohesion, and stability in a post-conflict country.

Macroeconomic benefits of farmer-pastoralist peace in Nigeria’s Middle Belt: An input-output analysis approach

Abstract Mozambique’s post-conflict development has recently focused on the promise of biofuels production, and the Government of Mozambique has accordingly made hundreds of agricultural concessions to foreign and domestic corporations since 2006. In response, local groups have sought community land grants to protect livelihoods. We seek to understand whether the magnitude and recentness of violent events during Mozambique’s 16-year civil war determined the success of communities’ efforts to secure lands. We hypothesize that violence weakens the ability of communities to protect their traditional land uses from concessions by lobbying for community land grants. This hypothesis - dubbed the “weak institutions hypothesis” - is contrasted with the idea that violence galvanizes political participation. We test the hypothesis using GIS-generated data at the district level on recognized community landholdings and civil war events. Controlling for factors such as market access, road distance to grain warehouses, and spatial auto-correlation, we find that more intense violence is possibly (but not significantly) associated with more land grants, and that districts experiencing more recent violence are actually more likely to lobby successfully for land grants - lending support to the idea that violence boosts community use of riskpooling institutions.