State-Society Relations in Civil Conflicts

Arzu Kibris and Özgür Kibris

Terrorism and Political Violence, 2020, vol. 32, issue 1, 138-166

Abstract: Civil conflicts are conceptualized as asymmetric, population-centric military struggles. The argument is that insurgencies, even though they are no match in military power to their state adversaries in many cases, resort to armed struggle nonetheless as a tool to impair state capacity, the quality of governance, and the ability of the state to honor the “social contract” in order to eventually destroy state authority and render the state irrelevant for the society. Note that this argument implies that state-society relations do react to the military course of the conflict. In this article, we provide empirical evidence for this implication. Introducing a new panel dataset on the long-running civil conflict in Turkey, we first conduct a micro-level analysis and demonstrate the significant impact rebel presence has upon state-society relations across localities and time. We then analyze the results of semi-structured interviews we had conducted with a group of experts from the conflict regions to decipher the possible mechanisms behind the association we observe in the data. The interviews support our motivating theoretical argument.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09546553.2017.1364634 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:ftpvxx:v:32:y:2020:i:1:p:138-166

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ftpv20

DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2017.1364634

Access Statistics for this article

Terrorism and Political Violence is currently edited by James Forest

More articles in Terrorism and Political Violence from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().