A Method to the Madness: How Economic Shocks Influence State Violence Against Civilians

Abstract

Though political theory may not have settled the debate on the ideal role of the state, there is consensus that, at least, the state ought to be a night watchman, protecting civilians from harm. But then what explains why states turn on their minimal promise, to violently repress their own citizens? Constructing a dataset that counts the number of episodes of state violence that occur in each sub-national administrative division, across 129 countries from 1989-2015, and using instrumental variable techniques from the Resource Curse literature, I find that positive shocks to mineral and fuel resource rents tend to increase the likelihood of government violence at a sub-national level. This paper further confirms the Resource Curse hypotheses that the relationship between economic shocks and state violence are more pronounced in resource-dependent countries, and countries with weak institutional strength. Finally, I use GIS mapping software to exploit sub-national variation in resource endowment, and find that the existence of non-lootable resources is not a sufficient and systematic predictor of sub-national violence, thus proposing a potential limit on the local validity of the Resource Curse scholarship.