The Dispossessed: A Labor-Market Analysis of Extreme Political Violence

Eva Milgrom ()
Additional contact information
Eva Milgrom: Senior Research Scholar, Stanford University

No 09-007, Discussion Papers from Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Highly-educated individuals are over-represented among violent operatives of insurgent organizations in the Middle East. This suggests four inter-related questions: (1) Why do those who seem to have good prospects willingly endanger their own lives? (2) What incentives drive these highly educated individuals to terrorist organizations in particular? (3) Why do sub-state welfare organizations turn violent? (4) Why do these organizations send so many highly educated, thoroughly dedicated members to their deaths instead of employing them in some other way? We answer these questions using a multidisciplinary approach, organized in a supply-demand framework, to study the market for violent operatives. We show how the conditions of a failing state give extra salience to personal significance for highly educated but dispossessed individuals and raise their value as violent operatives, creating gains from trade between them and the leaders of extremist organizations.

Keywords: extremists; political violence; insurgents; education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www-siepr.stanford.edu/repec/sip/09-007.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www-siepr.stanford.edu:80 (nodename nor servname provided, or not known)

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:sip:dpaper:09-007

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anne Shor ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).