Economic Shocks and Rebel

Austin L. Wright ()
Additional contact information
Austin L. Wright: Harris School of Public Policy

No 232, HiCN Working Papers from Households in Conflict Network

Abstract: Why do rebels vary their tactics? Some insurgents employ terrorism and hit-and run attacks; others wage conventional wars against state rivals. I argue rebels’ tactical choices reflect three constraints: economic opportunities of non-combatants, state strength, and rebel capacity. I test the argument with microdata on rebel violence in Colombia and exploit plausibly random shocks to local income. I find evidence that local economic shocks substantially affect rebel tactics. Specifically, when government forces benefit from local windfalls and economic opportunities for civilians improve, insurgents favor irregular tactics. Alternatively, when rebels are strengthened, they favor conventional tactics. These results are robust to accounting for numerous potential sources of bias, including atmospheric dispersion of illicit crop herbicides, violence spillovers from drug trafficking, and foreign military aid shocks. The main findings challenge prominent theories of insurgency, and are relevant to the comparative study of political violence, with important implications for scholars and policy makers.

JEL-codes: D74 F16 J30 O13 Q17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 55 pages
Date: 2016-09
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.hicn.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/HiCN-WP-232.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hic:wpaper:232

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HiCN Working Papers from Households in Conflict Network
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tilman Brück () and () and () and ().