New data on Indian security force fatalities and demographics

Staniland, Paul; Stommes, Drew

doi:10.1080/14736489.2019.1616261

Cited by 3 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…Naxalite insurgents have been active in the state of Andhra Pradesh, but rebel violence data for Andhra Pradesh do not exist due to extremely poor police records. Staniland & Stommes (2019) do not villages narrowly outside Scheduled Areas. This approach relies on weaker identification assump tions than a comparison encompassing all Scheduled Areas and nonScheduled Areas of a state; areas deep inside and far outside of Scheduled Area boundaries, in particular, are not comparable given the drastic differences in their background characteristics and potential outcomes.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 96%

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Descriptive representation and conflict reduction: Evidence from India’s Maoist rebellion

Milliff

Stommes

2023

Journal of Peace Research

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Can greater inclusion in democracy for historically disadvantaged groups reduce rebel violence? Democracy-building is a common tool in counterinsurgencies and post-conflict states, yet existing scholarship has faced obstacles in measuring the independent effect of democratic reforms. We evaluate whether quotas for Scheduled Tribes in local councils reduced rebel violence in Chhattisgarh, an Indian state featuring high-intensity Maoist insurgent activity. These quotas did not originate as a counterinsurgency technique, but instead as an effort to address the longstanding political marginalization of India’s Scheduled Tribes. We employ a geographic regression discontinuity design to study the wartime effects of quotas implemented in Chhattisgarh, finding that reservations reduced Maoist violence in the state. Exploratory analyses of mechanisms suggest that reservations reduced violence by bringing local elected officials closer to state security forces, providing a windfall of valuable information to counterinsurgents. Our study shows that institutional engineering, like reforms to create more inclusive representative democracy, can shape the trajectory of insurgent violence. Institutional engineering creating more inclusive representative democracy during an ongoing conflict can affect the political economy of information sharing in civil war and, ultimately, affect the trajectory of insurgent violence.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…Some fatality entries in theStaniland & Stommes (2019) dataset do not indicate the location at the villagelevel despite listing the state, district, and date of death. We recovered missing vil lage locations from archives of leading Englishlanguage daily newspapers in India, The Times of India, Hindustan Times, and The Indian Express.…”

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confidence: 99%

Descriptive representation and conflict reduction: Evidence from India’s Maoist rebellion

Milliff

Stommes

2023

Journal of Peace Research

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“…Because state security forces have strong incentives to commemorate their service members killed in action and invested substantial resources in compiling and publishing this information, we are confident that the data provide a comprehensive measure of security force fatalities(Staniland and Stommes, 2019). Supplemental results in Appendix A.1 show also that security force fatalities are highly correlated with civilian casualties in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, demonstrating that these data are an appropriate measure of overall insurgent violence.Some records in theStaniland and Stommes (2019) do not indicate location at the villagelevel. We recovered missing village locations from descriptions in archives of leading Englishlanguage daily newspapers in India, The Times of India, Hindustan Times, and The Indian Express.…”

mentioning

confidence: 89%

“…We measure insurgent violence with a dataset containing granular information about Indian security force fatalities in internal conflicts (Staniland and Stommes, 2019 We further supplemented the Staniland and Stommes (2019) dataset with geographic coordinates for fatalities missing geospatial information, using the Google Maps API and the "India Place The results suggest that our fatality data reliably reflect overall rebel violence.…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Descriptive Representation and Conflict Reduction: Evidence from India's Maoist Rebellion

Milliff¹,

Stommes²

2020

Preprint

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Can quotas for marginalized groups in democratic institutions reduce insurgent violence? Democracy-building is a common tool of modern counterinsurgencies, yet evidence is limited about whether and how it mitigates violence. We argue that descriptive representation quotas in local government reduce insurgent violence because they create a new class of informants who increase counterinsurgents’ access to information. We find quotas are most effective where rebel institutions are more robust, and thus legible to potential informants. We estimate reservations’ effect on violence within two Naxalite insurgency-affected Indian states, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, with regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences de- signs. Quotas reduced violence only in Chhattisgarh, a state where Naxalites constructed sophisticated institutions. Qualitative evidence shows quotas brought potential informants closer to the state, and newly-elected officials were sometimes assassinated by insurgents for being informants. We show how institutional engineering can alter the political economy of information and trajectory of a conflict.

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“…Fatality data collected from official Indian security force documents indicate insurgent violence against counterinsurgents during the Punjab conflict (Staniland and Stommes, 2019). The data from Punjab are sufficiently granular for supplemental RD analyses; latitude and longitude indi-cators for each fatality facilitate determining the constituency within which each fatality occurred.…”

Section: Rd Analysis Of Insurgent Attacks In Punjabmentioning

confidence: 99%

Civil Wartime Political Parties: Evidence from Four Rebellions in India

Stommes¹

2021

Preprint

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Elections frequently occur during civil wars. Yet, existing research does not adequately conceptualize the political parties contesting them nor, in particular, the party organizations which are ideologically aligned with insurgents but opposed to overthrowing the state. This study conceptualizes such non-revisionist parties as aligned status quo party organizations and situates them in a novel typology of civil wartime political parties. Regression discontinuity and qualitative analyses of four civil wars in India find that in localities where aligned status quo parties won elections, overall voter turnout significantly declined in subsequent election cycles and can be explained by rebels and state security forces intensifying their operations in these areas. The results illustrate that aligned status quo parties uniquely face counterinsurgent and insurgent coercion, reinforce the typology's utility, and contribute to our understanding of political parties and civil wartime democratic institutions.

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New data on Indian security force fatalities and demographics

Cited by 3 publications

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Descriptive representation and conflict reduction: Evidence from India’s Maoist rebellion

Descriptive representation and conflict reduction: Evidence from India’s Maoist rebellion

Descriptive Representation and Conflict Reduction: Evidence from India's Maoist Rebellion

Civil Wartime Political Parties: Evidence from Four Rebellions in India

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