Ideological motives and taxation by armed groups

Abstract

Which armed groups are the most likely to tax civilians? A common assumption is that armed groups only tax civilians when they lack access to other sources of revenue. However, recent insights have pointed to the fact that economic considerations are not the only influence on groups’ decisions to tax civilian populations. In this article, we argue that armed groups with a communist ideology are more likely to tax civilians than other groups because it serves as a testament to their ideological goals. We conduct a statistical analysis of armed groups operating from 1990 to 2015 and find support for our argument.

Rallying Fiscal Patriotism: War Taxes in the Contemporary World

“…Finally, a nascent research strand has turned the focus to the Global South and the contemporary era, while shifting the perspective to non-state armed groups. By investigating ‘rebel taxation’ in contemporary civil wars, these studies aim to understand variance in ‘rebel governance’ and their finance strategies (Breslawski & Tucker, 2021; Revkin, 2020; van Baalen, 2021) or uncover the mechanisms of embryonic state-building (de la Sierra, 2020). If the parallels between ‘state-making’ early-modern monarchs and contemporary rebel groupings remain contentious, the literature has nonetheless highlighted the continued centrality of war-time revenue mobilisation , and the necessity of consent, in addition to coercion , to this end.…”

The Logic of Kidnapping in Civil War: Evidence from Colombia

“…Regularized taxation has a wide range of benefits, including and beyond revenue generation. Taxation can help bolster group ideology, as it does for Islamist and communist groups (Breslawski and Tucker 2021;Revkin 2020). It can be used to impose social control (Arjona 2016) or reinforce state-building processes (Mampilly 2021;Rodriguez-Franco 2016).…”

“…Regularized taxation requires surveillance and collection, which taxpayers may not like. Thus, even with its revenue and state-building benefits, taxation is often avoided by resource-rich political actors, from rentier states to rebel groups (Breslawski and Tucker 2021;Ross 1999). The central problem with regularized taxation, however, is that it requires enforcement.…”