Political Insurgency Midterm 2

Micro Puzzle of Insurgency

- Participation in insurgencies is subject to the free-ride problem

- People who will benefit if the insurgency wins will receive those benefits whether they help the insurgency or not

Expected Utility of Joining Insurgencies

- pB - c > p_B

- p is the probability that insurgents win if the individual contributes and p_ is the probability that the insurgents win if the individual does not contribute

- B is the benefit that the individual receives if the insurgency wins, which is a public good

- c is the cost of contributing

- Since p - p_ is, in most cases, really small(almost 0), and B is a public good, this model suggests that people should not contribute to insurgency

Why Do People Participate?

- (p-p_)B - c + R > 0

- Some scholars add a term R to the equation as a catchall term to explain why people participate

- R is a value that they receive only if they participate

- Lichbach calls these selective incentives

- If R is large enough, people may rationally participate in insurgency

Selective Incentives

- Selective incentives can be material(loot, pay) or non-material or social/emotional(social recognition, sense of meaning, revenge), or security

- Kalyvas and Kocher show that people joined the Viet Cong to escape indiscriminate violence by South Vietnam

- Anecdotal evidence that young men joined the Maoists in Nepal to escape indiscriminate arrest

- Selective incentives can also be punishment for not contributing to the insurgency through violence, threats, and kidnaps to induce people to participate

Critiques of the Selective Incentives Approach

- Why do insurgencies bother to indoctrinate and propagandize? Why do they stress public goods in their recruitment?

- Selective incentive providers are themselves public goods, who provides those?

- Insurgencies are at a competitive disadvantage in supplying selective incentives because they have to siphon resources off for the insurgency

- Focusing on selective incentives can lead to self-destructive factionalism and purges

- For these reasons, Lichbach(1994) argues that material selective incentives are only useful to groups in combination with non-material social selective incentives

Rapacity Theory

- One possible answer to the micro puzzle

- Perhaps groups can overcome the free rider problem by paying recruits with “lootable” resources like diamonds and gold.

- If so, the presence of valuable lootable resources in a country or region should make those regions more conflict-prone

- There is more ethnic conflict in places like Venezuela with mining areas, and Sub-Saharan African mining areas, although this is correlation, not causation

International Response to Rapacity

- The international community has tried to halt the trade of illicitly gained raw materials using the Kimberley Process, which requires checking the source of diamonds

- It is hard to control because companies can get around the sanctions with corruption and subterfuge, like the Goldex scandal in Colombia

- Some states actively trade in raw materials gained from war like Russia trading in ill-gotten gold collected by the Wagner group in Africa

Collier’s Rapacity Argument

- A common refrain in early-Post-Cold-War thought was that “new” insurgencies were caused by the desire for loot

- Collier was a main proponent of that argument

- He claims that insurgencies were motivated by “greed” not “grievance”

- He argues that groups use grievances to justify rebellion to themselves, recruits, and the outside world, but the real reason is for insurgencies to make money

Collier’s Rapacity Evidence

- His analysis indicates that countries with more “primary commodity” exports are more prone to Civil Wars

- Argues that grievances like equality and ethnic conflict are not predictors of insurgencies

- Ethnic heterogeneity is associated with less conflict in his analysis

Problem with Collier’s Argument

- Many studies besides Collier’s have looked for a link between primary commodity exports and insurgency at the cross-country level

- The evidence is somewhat mixed: sometimes there is a relationship and sometimes there is not.

- Some of this problem is due to model dependence arising from extreme counterfactuals. This problem is particularly acute in cross-country studies

Local Rapacity Studies

- Other studies have looked at the effects of changing commodity prices on local conflict. When commodity prices go up, does war get worse?

- Since it compares small areas (5 km squares for example) within the same country, some of which have mining and some of which do not, it avoids some of the extreme counterfactual problem.

- Commodity prices are thought to vary quasi-randomly in response to market forces and therefore, should be uncorrelated with other things that may be causing conflict

- There are a lot of these studies and they have produced varied results.

Blair, Christenson and Rudrik Rapacity Study(2021)

- Found that on average:

- Increases in artisanal mineral prices increased violent conflict by a small amount.

- Increases in prices of commercially mined minerals had no discernible effect

- Oil and gas prices are associated with a stronger positive increase in violence

- Increases in ag. commodity prices reduced violent conflict

Other Reasons For the Link Between Mineral Wealth/Conflict

- Weak states, weak societies, and feasibility of rebellion

- Grievances: inequality, environmental degradation, inflation, migration

- Commitment problems may be another reason commodity price changes may be linked to conflict

- In Sexton’s analysis, environmental degradation, exacerbated by local mismanagement and corruption, causes the conflict

- Berman also found that conflict was worse in ethnic areas that had more corruption and more mineral resources

Opportunity Cost

- “the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen”

- Like the rapacity theory, the opportunity cost theory posits that people join insurgencies for personal economic reasons

- According to this hypothesis, when earnings from legitimate economy are low(when opportunity cost is low), people join insurgencies as a job

Theoretical Problem with Opportunity Cost

- These theories say that changes that make it easier for insurgencies to recruit and pay soldiers make wars more likely

- But that by itself should not make war occur or violence go up.

- We still need to explain why the combatants cannot resolve their dispute peacefully.

- A possible explanation: these changes (e.g. commodity price changes) also cause commitment problems

Opportunity Cost Theory Evidence

- The argument implies that increases in prices in labor-intensive products (like agricultural commodities) should reduce conflict as those plantations hire more workers.

- Dube & Vargas (op. cit.) and Guardado (2018) found that increases in coffee prices reduced violent conflict, which they take as evidence of this effect.

- Crost & Felter (2020) by contrast, found that increases in banana prices increased violent conflict in the Philippines. They say perhaps insurgents were blackmailing large plantations.

- Meta-analysis by Blair found that increases in ag. Commodity prices reduced violent conflict

Opportunity Cost Contradictory Evidence

- Berman et. al found that violent acts went down when unemployment went up in a study in Iraq from 2004-2007

- There are other possible reasons for this finding: Perhaps strategies that are effective against insurgency(like roadblocks) also harm employment

- Regardless, the finding does not support the opportunity cost theory

Failures of Opportunity Cost Programs

- The Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Program (APRP) lauded by Levin (above) closed down in 2016

- “While APRP was being implemented, armed violence and insecurity in the country (as well as in APRP reintegration and community project areas) largely increased and there was no significant diminishment of the military capacity of armed opposition through the APRP re-integration process.

- Studies of these programs typically show effects of economic outcomes but only weak or non-existent effects on social and political outcomes.

- “Many violent groups do not use material incentives to motivate people. For such individuals, employment and poverty alleviation may be ineffective, and other factors, such as injustices, may need to be addressed.”

Social and Psychological Explanations

- Social incentives and psychological processes may serve as the R variable and help explain the micro puzzle of participation in insurgencies

- Shills and Janowitz(1948) argue that some units in Wehrmacht remained cohesive even after it was clear Germany lost the war, not because of loyalty to Nazism but to the “primary group”, aka their platoon or company, that they knew personally

- Sebastian Hafner in Defying Hitler: Military training made him feel unit cohesion, even though he was strongly anti-Nazi

- Armed forces purposely create this cohesion with uniforms, head shaving, marching, and singing

Extrinsic and Intrinsic Social Incentives

- Extrinsic social incentives are enforced by society and require that the person’s actions be observed

- Intrinsic social incentives are felt internally by the person without society taking any action, regardless of whether they are observed

- Distinction between guilt and shame, and pride and honor

Observing Intrinsic Social Incentives

- Intrinsic social incentives are harder to instill than extrinsic ones, but they are effective when observation is difficult

- They seem to be more important for insurgencies than state armed groups, as they focus on cultivating a “band of brothers” effect amongst its members

- In most of the post-WWII period, the Peshmerga in Iraqi Kurdistan have been a non-state armed group fighting for Kurdish autonomy against the Iraqi state

- With the U.S. invasion of 2003, Iraqi Kurdistan became de facto autonomous, at which point the Peshmerga became more like a state armed group

Creating Intrinsic Social Motivation

- In non-state armed groups, ideological indoctrination seems to be particularly important

- FARC in Colombia. “There is documentary and testimonial evidence of significant resources expended by the FARC on ideological training for its members” (Ugariza and Craig 2012)

- Maoist units in Nepal received daily political and social indoctrination

- Our Peshmerga subjects reported much more indoctrination prior to the Peshmerga becoming a de facto state armed group

- “Patriotic” indoctrination in the Ivory Coast

Insurgent Collective Action(Wood)

- She discusses a variety of explanations for peasants' participation in El Salvador’s civil war, including Marxist class consciousness, material selective incentives, protection from state attacks, and pre-existing social networks

- In the end, she argues that all of these explanations are lacking in El Salvador

- She coins a new terms “pleasures of agency” to explain why they participate

- “We feel something already, and we're sure that we will be free - that is a point of the war that we have won… that we not be seen as slaves, that we’ve won”

- She argues that some people derive utility from asserting their humanity, that they, and not some other person, determine their own fate. This is an intrinsic motivation

Observing Extrinsic Social Incentives

- These are social punishments placed on people who performed poorly(deserted) in the war or honors given to those who performed well

- Costa and Kahan in Heroes and Cowards(2008) show that the likelihood that a soldier will return home is lower if they were a deserter

- They also show that deserters moved farther away from home than non-deserters who moved

- These effects were affected by the political leanings of their home districts: Deserters from McClellan counties in 1864 were more likely to return home, and deserters from Lincoln counties in 1864 were more likely to move

Mixed Experimental Evidence on Changing Social Habits

- Blattman et. al. (2017) conducted a randomized control trial that delivered cognitive behavioral training to at-risk youth in Liberia.

- Some received only an unconditional cash transfer, and some received both.

- The program reduced self-reported “anti-social behavior” significantly and was still effective ten years later

- The problem is the “self-reported” part. Did the program actually reduce anti-social behavior or just make recipients better at hiding it?

- The program had no consistent effects on other measures like acceptance of political violence

Culture of Honor Experiment

- Cohen and Nisbet (1996) explained that Southern states are more violent because the South was an “honor” culture in which men were expected to respond to insults with violence.

- They hired another student to bump and call the subject an “asshole” during the experiment, and then the researchers measured the subjects’ responses.

- They did many tests of subjects’ aggression and stress responses, most of which showed that insulted southerners experienced more stress and more perceived loss of masculinity and reacted more aggressively than insulted northerners.

Culture of Honor Physiological Effects(Cohen/Nisbet)

- These results show the remarkable effect that social norms, which are a completely human construction, can produce physiologically.

- The increase in physical stress response may be one path through which socialization produces intrinsic social motivations.

- The importance for this class is not just that people from different cultures react to social stimuli differently, but that socialization and indoctrination can produce a physical response, which may help

explain why people comply with intrinsic rewards and punishments

Cohen and Nisbet Hypothesis

- Cohen and Nisbet hypothesize that honor cultures arise when the state and property rights are weak, so that individuals are responsible for guarding their own property

- They hypothesize that the South was colonized by Scots-Irish herding cultures who brought these norms with them when they immigrated.

- People from the more urbanized and developed North were settled by different ethnic groups that did not sustain these norms.

- The South is not the only honor culture in the world. Some people characterize the Middle East and North Africa this way

Devoted Actors

- People who are motivated by sacred values and have fused their identities with that of a group

Sacred Values

- Not necessarily religious, they can also be about secular values like freedom and national autonomy

- Immune to material trade offs and indivisible

- Immune to temporal and special discounting, meaning they’re valued even if they are far in the future or a long distance away

- Closely tied to emotions and evoke moral outrage when they are violated

- They are not norms. People comply with norms to avoid social sanctions, but people will comply with sacred values even if they are punished for doing so

Sacred Values and Political Conflict

- When people think about sacred values, they use the part of their brain that makes cost-benefit calculations less, and they use the part of the brain that makes rule-based decisions more.

- These results hint that, for sacred values, people might not do the kind of cost-benefit thinking in the bargaining model of war. They only think in terms of right and wrong.

- “Sacred values” have been used by psychologists and anthropologists to explain why some political conflicts are so intractable.

- They can also explain why people may not count the cost of participation, even in extreme cases like participation in suicide attacks.

Constructing Sacred Values

- A hypothesis about the “why” question is straightforward. It is easy to see why leaders might like to instill sacred values in their followers if they know how to do it.

- Presumably, devoted actors are good fighters. They will defend sacred values at great cost to themselves for little material reward.

- While it is easy to see why leaders might want devoted actors as followers, it can backfire if the leader wants to make a peace agreement later.

- Since they are socially constructed, if and when they are pernicious, how can they be socially dismantled?

Sacred Values and Social Exclusion

- Pretus et. al. (2018) studied the attitudes young Muslim men in Spain who agreed with violent extremist ideas in a survey.

- Sacred values were defined as those values respondents were not willing to give up in exchange for instrumental values like better economic conditions for their community

- Respondents then played a game. In the treatment, subjects were excluded by Spanish “players.” In the control, they were not

- After being excluded, people were significantly more likely to report being willing to fight and die for a sacred value, people treated non-sacred values more like sacred values, and they had a strong emotional response

Sacred Values as Explanations

- “Sacred values” have been used by psychologists to explain why some political conflicts are so intractable. In this way, they are an explanation for the macro puzzle.

- They can also explain why people may not count the cost of participation—even in extreme cases like participation in suicide attacks—and thus explain the micro puzzle.

- The leaders of these groups are typically religiously motivated.

- This makes crafting peace agreements with them extra difficult since they see any compromise as apostasy and a compromise of their integrity