Roads to Rule, Roads to Rebel: Relational State Capacity and Conflict in Africa

Abstract

Weak state capacity is one of the most important explanations of civil conflict. Yet, current conceptualizations of state capacity typically focus only on the state while ignoring the relational nature of armed conflict. We argue that opportunities for conflict arise where relational state capacity is low, that is, where the state has less control over its subjects than its potential challengers. This occurs in ethnic groups that are poorly accessible from the state capital, but are internally highly interconnected. To test this argument, we digitize detailed African road maps and convert them into a road atlas akin to Google Maps. We measure the accessibility and internal connectedness of groups via travel times obtained from this atlas and simulate road networks for an instrumental variable design. Our findings suggest that low relational state capacity increases the risk of armed conflict in Africa.

Toponym-assisted map georeferencing: Evaluating the use of toponyms for the digitization of map collections

“…Georeferencing mapped documents is an important step in the process of making archival and contemporaneous maps discoverable, searchable, and otherwise accessible [ 30 , 35 , 42 , 104 ]. However, the process of georeferencing is—even today—largely manual and inefficient.…”

“…These efforts have enabled maps to be used as source material in cadestral and land-use databases used by local governments, global administrative boundary datasets, databases of fauna and soil distribution, and databases of oil-and-gas exploration, among many other applications [28][29][30][31][32][33]. As sources of unique historical information, data extracted from maps are frequently used in everything from the study of land-use change and hydrological mapping, to research on international development and political conflict [34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43]. However, the georeferencing process is itself resource intensive, leading researchers to explore methods for full or semi-automation [20,26].…”

Roads, Electricity, and Jobs: Evidence of Infrastructure Complementarity in Sub-Saharan Africa

“…Though the same reasons motivated the construction of transportation networks in the post-independence period, country leaders followed a different strategy in expanding these networks. They instead built transportation networks in a way that would allow them to extend the exercise of their authority from the "political center" of the country to their entire territory (Herbst, 2014), including remote areas and all ethnic homelands (Muller-Crepon et al, 2020). Indeed, the arbitrary partition of Africa by European leaders at the Berlin Conference in 1884 and 1885 endowed the countries that emerged from this experiment with different levels of ethnic heterogeneity.…”

“…Work by Muller-Crepon et al (2020) relies on a theory according to which the accessibility of ethnic homelands by public authorities is a prerequisite for political leaders to extend their domination over remote areas (Tollefsen and Buhaug, 2015;Raleigh and Hegre, 2009;Buhaug and Rod, 2006;Herbst, 2000;Fearon and Laitin, 2003). Indeed Muller-Crepon et al ( 2020) argue that political instability is predominant in areas where political power has very little control over the inhabitants; more specifically, they establish that the ethnic groups' homelands that are difficult to reach from the national capital are also sites of rebellion and political conflicts.…”

Crowding out the field: External Support to Insurgents and the Intensity of Inter-rebel Fighting in Civil Wars

“…6 This means being able to differentiate themselves from contenders in wars involving several competing organizations. This distinction can be achieved through discursive appeals (Tokdemir et al 2020), but it can also be based on active competitive behaviors on the field. This logic of 'outbidding' has been shown to influence the treatment of civilians (Bloom 2004; Conrad and Greene 2015), but we contend that it can also influence patterns of violence between rebels.…”