Population, Resources, and Political Violence

Abstract

Recent cross-national studies have found only moderate support for the idea that population pressure and resource scarcity may lead to political violence, contrary to much of the case study literature in the field. This article suggests that the level of analysis may be at the heart of this discrepancy. In a time-series study of political violence in 27 Indian states for the 1956–2002 period, it is tested whether high population pressure on renewable natural resources, youth bulges, and differential growth rates between religious groups are associated with higher levels of armed conflict, political violent events, and Hindu-Muslim riots. The results are generally more supportive of the resource scarcity and conflict scenario than recent global studies. The article further suggests that youth bulges affect all three forms of violence and that differential growth rates are positively related to armed conflict.

Political competition, relative deprivation, and perceived threat: a research note on anti-Christian violence in India

“…The most significant recent statistical analyses of Hindu-Muslim violence, in our view, are those by Henrik Urdal (2008), Ashutosh Varshney (2002) and Steven Wilkinson (2004). Their work guides the present analysis in important ways.…”

“…This would indicate that ethnic violence is primarily an issue in low-income, urbanizing areas (Engineer 1984;Horowitz 2001), but the argument can be extended to rural areas. Urdal, for example, finds a positive association between rural population density and armed conflict, but no association between rural population density and Hindu-Muslim riots (Urdal 2008 Police presence is a passable index of state strength. The police in India are notoriously corrupt and ineffective, so much so that Brass (2003) doubts whether the addition of more or bettertrained police would lead to a decrease in Hindu-Muslim violence, and Wilkinson (2004) finds little support for state-weakening theories in his research on Hindu-Muslim violence.…”

“…But they are more regularly isolated events. Therefore, unlike the database developed by Varshney (2002) and Wilkinson (2004), and used 4 by Urdal (2008), which focuses on large-scale Hindu-Muslim riots, our database contains a record of individual incidents of violence against Christians. These incidents expand the current quantitative depiction of anti-minority violence to include the routine (Pandey 2006) nature of Hindu-Christian violence.…”

“…The lag is less of a problem on some measures than others. For example, the effect of differential growth on ethnic violence, it has been argued, is largely about perceived relative growth, and so one would assume changes in growth rate would have a lagging effect (Urdal 2008 …”

“…It is relatively widely attested in the extant literature that impoverished countries are more vulnerable to internal political violence (Collier and Hoeffler 2004;Urdal 2008). Similarly, resource-scarcity theorists posit that population growth and population density, combined with inadequate renewable natural resources, leads to competition and, in certain circumstances, violence between groups (e.g.…”