Beyond divide and rule: Weak dictators, natural resources and civil conflict

Abstract

We propose a model where weak rulers have incentives to let ethnically divided countries plunge in civil war. Allowing inter-group fighting reduces production-and hence the tax base-but enables the ruler to devote more resources to increasing the tax rate. This mechanism is increasingly salient with larger amounts of natural resources, especially if these are unequally distributed across ethnic groups. We validate the theoretical predictions using crosscountry data, and show that our empirical results are robust to controlling for the usual determinants of civil war incidence, and to using various proxies for the ruler's relative weakness and for the presence of natural resources.

Religious co-option in autocracy: A theory inspired by history

“…It provided that a driver who runs over and kills someone deliberately standing in the path of the vehicle is not to blame. This judgement happened a few days after a woman was killed by a minibus under the control of the police as she tried to stop them from arresting her sister-in-law (Daily News, Cairo, December [29][30]2007). 5 This belief in the God-given authority of monarchs was central to the Roman Catholic vision of governance in the Middle Ages, Renaissance and the Ancien Regime.…”

Religion as a tool for authoritarian legitimation: The case of Bangladesh

“…Studies on classical closed authoritarianism have underscored that autocrats adopt various strategies. These include divide‐and‐rule (e.g., de Luca et al, 2014; Acemoglu et al, 2004), power‐sharing and bargaining (e.g., Lizzeri & Persico, 2004; Morelli & Rohner, 2014), and optimal succession rules (Konrad & Mui, 2015; ​ Konrad & Skaperdas, 2007). These strategies have been broadly divided into two categories: repression and cooptation (Auriol & Platteau, 2016, p. 8; Frantz & Kendall‐Taylor, 2014).…”

Sourcing from conflict regions: Policies to improve transparency in international supply chains

“…Wick and Bulte () and Butler and Gates () employ a contest success function (as we do) to model the resource conflict and they analyze how the shape of this function determines the intensity of the conflict. In De Luca, Sekeris, and Vargas () an autocratic leader has an incentive to promote fights between ethnic groups for natural resource access. Janus () sets up a two‐period model to analyze how exogenous changes of the resource price influence the intensity of a civil conflict.…”