Terrorism Financing, Recruitment and Attacks: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Limodio, Nicola

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3384109

Cited by 13 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…This literature began with studies of the origins, internal organization, and incentives of these illegal firms and primitive states (Schelling, 1971;Fiorentini and Peltzman, 1997;Konrad and Skaperdas, 1998). More recently, there has been a surge of interest in international organized crime, including the personnel economics and career paths of gang members (Khanna et al, 2019;Sviatschi, 2018;Carvalho and Soares, 2016); studies of market structure and the production of violence (Castillo and Kronick, 2020;Brown et al, 2020;Bueno de Mesquita, 2020); the effects of exogenous supply and demand shocks on competition and violence levels Dube et al, 2016;Sobrino, 2019;Limodio, 2018); and the historical origins of drug cartels (Murphy and Rossi, 2020). There are also parallels between gangs strategically increasing rule in response to state presence, and a political economy literature on how organized criminals influence elections (De Feo and De Luca, 2017;Alesina et al, 2019;Dal Bó et al, 2006;Acemoglu et al, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gang rule: Understanding and Countering Criminal Governance

Blattman¹,

Duncan²,

Lessing³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Gangs govern millions worldwide. Why rule? and how do they respond to states? Many argue that criminal rule provides protection when states do not, and that increasing state services could crowd gangs out. We began by interviewing leaders from 30 criminal groups in Medellín. The conventional view overlooks gangs’ indirect incentives to rule: governing keeps police out and fosters civilian loyalty, protecting other business lines. We present a model of duopolistic competition with returns to loyalty and show under what conditions exogenous changes to state protection causes gangs to change governance levels. We run the first gang-level field experiment, intensifying city governance in select neighborhoods for two years. We see no decrease in gang rule. We also examine a quasi-experiment. New borders in Medellín created discontinuities in access to government services for 30 years. Gangs responded to greater state rule by governing more. We propose alternatives for countering criminal governance.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gang rule: Understanding and Countering Criminal Governance

Blattman¹,

Duncan²,

Lessing³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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“…Prior work in economics has investigated the causes of civil conflict (Fearon and Laitin, 2003;Collier and Hoeffler, 2004;Bazzi and Blattman, 2014;Limodio, 2019;Manacorda and Tesei, 2020), and examined development interventions that occur during ongoing insurgencies (Berman et al, 2011;Fetzer, 2020;Beath et al, 2013;Crost and Johnston, 2014;Sexton, 2016). Seminal theoretical work has highlighted the role of state capacity in shaping conflict dynamics, including the end of war (Wittman, 1979;Werner, 1999;Besley, Timothy;Persson et al, 2010;Padró i Miquel and Yared, 2012;Powell, 2013;Gennaioli and Voth, 2015;Esteban et al, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Security Transitions

Fetzer

Souza

Eynde

et al. 2021

American Economic Review

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How do foreign powers disengage from a conflict? We study this issue by examining the recent, large-scale security transition from international troops to local forces in the ongoing civil conflict in Afghanistan. We construct a new dataset that combines information on this transition process with declassified conflict outcomes and previously unreleased quarterly survey data of residents’ perceptions of local security. Our empirical design leverages the staggered roll-out of the transition, and employs a novel instrumental variables approach to estimate the impact. We find a significant, sharp, and timely decline of insurgent violence in the initial phase: the security transfer to Afghan forces. We find that this is followed by a significant surge in violence in the second phase: the actual physical withdrawal of foreign troops. We argue that this pattern is consistent with a signaling model, in which the insurgents reduce violence strategically to facilitate the foreign military withdrawal to capitalize on the reduced foreign military presence afterward. Our findings clarify the destabilizing consequences of withdrawal in one of the costliest conflicts in modern history, and yield potentially actionable insights for designing future security transitions. (JEL D74, F51, F52, O17)

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“…The opposition provides material rewards in the form public or club goods (e.g., Berman 2011; Berman and Laitin 2008), denoted by

B &gt;0

, to nonradicalized dissidents, which reflects the net benefit of individual participation, that is, the benefits the opposition provides minus the potential punishments inflicted by the government (which can be stochastic). The material rewards provided by the opposition could be derived from drug trade, natural resource extraction, or illicit financial networks (see Limodio 2019). Because our main contribution is about the strategic link between radicalization and repression, we abstract from public finance concerns of opposition groups.…”

Section: The Baseline Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sowing the Seeds: Radicalization as a Political Tool

Lehmann

Tyson

2021

American J Political Sci

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Do radicalized individuals with no logistical assistance from opposition groups generate liabilities or advantages for opposition leaders? To address this question, we develop a theory that articulates a novel strategic channel connecting radicalization, defined as self‐motivation to dissent, to repression targeting an opposition group's operational capacity or its leadership. Our main result shows that targeted repression is strictly decreasing in the proportion of radicalized citizens. We endogenize opposition leaders' decision to radicalize citizens and show that opposition leaders, even absent any direct benefit to radicalize, nevertheless invest effort into radicalization. Thus, radicalization is a political tool to deter repression by decreasing its usefulness. To better understand this strategic consequence, we analyze two common policy interventions—economic and psychological—and show that improving economic conditions reduces both radicalization efforts and dissent, while making individuals psychologically less susceptible to radicalization can sometimes backfire and increase dissent because it increases leaders' radicalization efforts.

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Terrorism Financing, Recruitment and Attacks: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Cited by 13 publications

References 34 publications

Gang rule: Understanding and Countering Criminal Governance

Gang rule: Understanding and Countering Criminal Governance

Security Transitions

Sowing the Seeds: Radicalization as a Political Tool

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