The Political Economy of Socioenvironmental Conflict: Evidence from Peru

David Kreitmeir ()
Additional contact information
David Kreitmeir: Monash University

No 2024-05, SoDa Laboratories Working Paper Series from Monash University, SoDa Laboratories

Abstract: Over the past two decades, violence against land and environmental activists has been on the rise, besetting even stable democracies. Using a unique, fine-grained data set on social conflict events in Peru and exogenous variation in world mineral prices, I document a strong link between local mineral rents and violent state repression of socioenvironmental protests in a democratic institutional setting. I show that the increase in the use of excessive force cannot be explained by changes in protester behavior. Empirical findings highlight the role of local authorities: the election of a pro-mining mayor is associated with a higher prevalence of state repression and corruption in the constituency. The legal and democratic accountability of local authorities is, however, found to be limited. The reported increase in corruption does not translate into more investigations against pro-mining mayors for corruption offenses nor are reelection results of incumbents found to be negatively affected by state violence against protesters. Finally, I show that violent state repression is successful in forestalling conflict resolution agreements that acknowledge protesters’ demands.

Keywords: Resource curse; mining; social conflict; state repression; civil society (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 H7 O13 O16 P16 Q34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-env and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://soda-wps.s3-website-ap-southeast-2.amazonaw ... r/sodwps/2024-05.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:ajr:sodwps:2024-05

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://www.monash.edu/business/soda-labs/home

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SoDa Laboratories Working Paper Series from Monash University, SoDa Laboratories SoDa Laboratories, Monash University, Victoria 3800, Australia. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ashani Amarasinghe ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).