Rural Grievances, Landholding Inequality, and Civil Conflict

Abstract

Economic grievances associated with landholding inequality play a central role in theories of political instability and civil conflict. However, cross-national empirical studies have failed to confirm a link between unequal distributions of land and civil war. This is due to problems in measuring and theorizing rural inequality. This paper makes a novel distinction between the effects of total landholding inequality and the concentration of land ownership on conflict. Total landholding inequality, which includes landlessness, captures economic grievances in the countryside and is positively associated with conflict. Gini coefficients of landholding concentration do not only capture grievances, but also landowners' ability to act collectively as rebels and a repressive rural elite. The relationship between landholding Ginis and conflict is shaped like an inverted 'U': inequality is associated with an increasing likelihood of conflict, but as concentration of landholdings reaches very high levels the likelihood of conflict decreases with the formation of a small repressive class of landowners. Results of cross-national regressions using new data on total land inequality and the concentration of landholdings confirm these predictions, providing novel evidence that landholding inequality is an important underlying cause of civil war.

Corruption, Elite Contestation, and Parliaments: Why Do Legislatures Become Stronger in Authoritarian Regimes?

“…To corroborate this evidence on the cross-national level, I utilize measures of landholding inequality provided by Thomson (2016). Table A31 in the Appendix shows the results from linear regressions with Time-Series Cross-Sectional Data including regime-fixed effects and more extensive control variables such as the rate of urbanization, the size of the agricultural area in a country, and the elevation, all taken from Thomson (2016). The results show that an increase in legislative corruption is indeed associated with more landholding inequality.…”

Democratic breakdown and terrorism

“…5 Following the relative deprivation school of political violence, these features of democratic breakdown are expected to generate grievances. According to relative deprivation theory, which informs contemporary research on grievances and political violence (Cederman et al, 2011;Thomson, 2016), grievances arise when there is a perceived discrepancy between the conditions an individual or group feels entitled to and the conditions they feel capable of achieving; importantly, the standards by which individuals determine what they are entitled to often derive from past conditions (Gurr, 1970: 24-25). After a democratic breakdown, groups that were once included in the political process find themselves excluded and, quite frequently, new targets for state repression.…”

Urban Concentration and Civil War

“…Drawing on preexisting social and political grievances in these areas allows rebels to harness discontent with neglected local demands or active government repression of political movements. The uneven distribution of resources results in rural resentment, giving those cut off from state power a set of reasons upon which rebels may use to mobilize the countryside (Thomson 2016). Rebel groups can more easily draw upon these grievances to form sizable movements capable of frontally contesting the state.…”

“…When a country has a high level of urban concentration, the central government typically retains complete control of only the capital and perhaps a few other key cities, leaving peripheral communities largely untouched by state institutions. The lack of state control over villages in the periphery, and its failure to deliver resources to such areas, exacerbates local grievances among rural communities and allows rebels to harness this resentment to mobilize (Bates 1981; Wallace 2013; Thomson 2016). Not only can rebels mobilize more easily in countries with high levels of urban concentration, but the lack of state presence in these rural spaces allows rebels to more easily gain control of territory where they can train, prepare, stock weapons, and seek foreign aid without hindrance (McColl 1969), resulting in better trained and better equipped rebels.…”