A Rent-Seeking Perspective on Imperial Peace

Indraneel Dasgupta ()

No 17312, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We model a rent-seeking contest among two 'identity ideologues', differentially located along a uni-dimensional identity continuum, and a 'mercenary', who can choose any location in-between. The contest jointly awards an identity-relevant good ('religion') and an identity-irrelevant good ('money'). The mercenary values only money, the ideologues value both money and religion. The ideologues are worse off, at an increasing rate, when the winner is located farther away. We show that, under reasonable restrictions, the following hold. A decline in the mercenary's cost of contest effort reduces conflict. Both ideologues lose in success probability, but gain in expected utility. Elimination of the mercenary increases conflict and makes the ideologues more successful yet worse off. Our results rationalize 'imperial peace' – long periods of stability and social peace in multi-ethnic empires, and explain why the weakening and breakdown of such empires is often associated with a sharp rise in ethnic violence within their territories.

Keywords: rent-seeking contest; identitarian distance; ethnic conflict; imperial peace; decolonization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D74 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2024-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp17312.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: A rent-seeking perspective on imperial peace (2024)
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:iza:izadps:dp17312

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().