Browsing by Subject "ethnic conflict"
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Item Embargo Building Coercive Capacity: Three Essays(2023) Saijo, HarunobuThis thesis is comprised of three chapters on different challenges state-builders face when creating an effective state apparatus. When principals (such as authoritarian leaders or elected representatives) set up security organs, they must make officials in the security services overcome collective action problems to maintain security. However, the achieved cooperation can also undermine state security by generating the potential for agency problems such as collusion and treason. Thus, leaders must balance their efforts to empower collective action among security officials while managing this principal-agent problem and undermining adverse collective action. The chapter "Fending Off Shield and Sword: How Strategic Purges of State Security Personnel Protect Dictators" focuses on the strategic use of purges by leaders to undermine adverse collective action among officials. I test the theory that leaders purge according to factional ties to undermine collective action on the case of the Stalinist purges of the Soviet secret police using individual-level career data. Extant conflicts and social cleavages often shape how states expand power to the periphery. The chapter “How Settlement and Inter-Ethnic Conflict Over Property Rights Shapes State Capacity” focuses on Japanese-led state-building in Manchuria. I examine the strategies that states utilize in expanding state capacity through exploiting ethnic conflicts and cleavages between its subjects, finding that conflict can induce cooperation with state-building efforts from some groups but not others, due to different incentives arising from conflicting property rights institutions. I also address the trade-offs between deploying coercion and building infrastructural power, such as the adverse effects of repression on the state’s ability to administer and obtain information about its population. To highlight this tradeoff, my dissertation chapter titled “How Repression Undermines Infrastructural Power” shows that repression by police forces retards their ability to ascertain accurate information about the population. This relationship is tested by analyzing the legacies of arbitrary Chinese repressions against Korean settlers in warlord-era Manchuria. There is a strong relationship between anti-Korean repression and lower state capacity in the subsequent period, and police literacy data suggests this is partly driven by the inability to recruit quality candidates.
Item Open Access Marking Territory: Modeling the Spread of Ethnic Conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1992-1995(Economic Research Initiatives at Duke (ERID) Working Paper, 2022-05-20) Becker, Charles; Devine, Peter; Dogo, Harun; Margolin, ElizabethItem Open Access Re-Thinking Geography and Civil War: Geography and Rebel Identity(2011) Thomas, Matthew EdwardScholarship on ethnic conflict and civil war has often examined the role of geographic factors, such as rough terrain and exploitable natural resources, in either prolonging or even initiating the conflict. However, many of these studies focus upon the material/tactical advantages that geography provides to the rebels. I argue that analysis of geography and civil war must account for the effects of geography upon the insurgency's identity (ethnic, religious, ideological), which is the most decisive factor in the rebels' ability to galvanize popular support. Using regression analysis and case studies, I demonstrate that while the geographic distance between rebel territory and the capital city in a war-afflicted country is of great importance, the presence of identity can compensate for the lack of favorable geography.
Item Open Access Revenge of the Radical Right: Why Minority Accommodation Mobilizes Extremist Voting(2012) Siroky, Lenka BustikovaHow can we explain variation in support for radical right parties over time and across post-communist democracies? This project suggests that support for radical right parties is driven by the politics of accommodation, and is aimed at counteracting the political inroads, cultural concessions and economic gains of politically organized minorities. It differs from other studies of extremist politics in three primary respects: (1) Unlike current approaches that focus on competition between the extreme and mainstream parties, I emphasize dynamics between the radical right party and non- proximate parties that promote minority rights. (2) Several approaches argue that xenophobia drives support for the radical right, whereas I show that xenophobia is not a distinct feature of the radical right party support base; what differentiates radical right voters from other voters is opposition to governmental transfers towards politically organized minorities. (3) I endogenize issue salience and identify coalition politics - i.e., coalitions of mainstream parties and parties supporting minority protection - as a key mechanism that increases the salience of identity issues in political competition, and benefits radical right parties. The project tests these propositions empirically, and finds supportive evidence using two unique micro-level surveys and an original party-election-level data set covering all post-communist democracies.