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| 1 |
ID:
120984
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2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article investigates whether political or economic grievances were the main driver of the mass demonstrations in Niger in 2009-10, which occurred at a time of famine and the President's attempt to defy the constitution and seek a third term in office. Using original survey data from a quasi-random sample of Niamey residents, the article shows that low prospects of upward mobility are associated with a higher likelihood of protest participation, whereas opposition to the President's anti-constitutional politics is not. Membership in civic organizations is also associated with higher protest participation, but not because these groups are effective at framing the issues: what matters is the capacity of organizations to mobilize individuals. This suggests that civil society may have a galvanizing effect on citizens, even if efforts to win hearts and minds fail. The article concludes that the uprisings were driven mainly by economic grievances, thus contradicting international perceptions of the protests as a public outcry for democracy and casting doubt on the motivations behind supposedly pro-democracy movements, especially in contexts where autocracy and poverty coincide.
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| 2 |
ID:
167426
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A large body of scholarship suggests that economic grievances play an important role in civil wars. But what specific economic activities trigger such grievances, and why would governments not take proactive steps to limit economic grievances in order to stabilize their regimes? This article argues that specific economic activities—those that undermine a producer’s ability to exit the formal economy—cause governments to make taxation decisions that, despite the costliness of fighting, increase the likelihood of civil war. An inability for producers to exit the formal economy also undermines regional autonomy deals by encouraging governments to grab short-term rents despite the risk of triggering civil war. After deriving this “redistributive grievance” mechanism by analyzing an infinite-horizon bargaining model with endogenous labor supply and economic production, I address a specific empirical source of such redistributive grievances: oil-rich regions fight separatist civil wars relatively frequently. Capital-intense, geographically concentrated, and immobile oil production corresponds with conditions in the formal model that predict redistributive grievances and war. Moreover, I argue that applying the redistributive grievances mechanism to understanding the oil-separatism relationship also highlights shortcomings of alternative “greed”-based explanations.
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| 3 |
ID:
176543
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The rise of right-wing populism should be studied as a truly global phenomenon. Domestic and regional contexts are obviously crucial, yet a narrow focus on the domestic realm fails to capture some of the key constituents and paradoxical features of the rise and resilience of right-wing populist projects around the world. Therefore, right-wing populism and the way its contradictions are ‘managed’ ought to be understood within the context of mutual interactions between: 1) an economy-identity nexus and 2) a domestic-foreign policy nexus. A critical review of six controversial aspects of right-wing populism in the global North and global South is used to substantiate this main argument.
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| 4 |
ID:
132230
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2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
More than 3,500 people have died in Nigeria since 2009 when Boko Haram, a radical Islamist group from northeastern Nigeria, launched its violent campaign to wrest power from the Nigerian government and foist an Islamic state under the supreme law of Sharia. Attempts at negotiating with the group, including the recent amnesty offer extended to its members by the Nigerian government, have stalled due to distrust on both sides and the factionalized leadership of the group's different cells. This article provides a systematic account of Boko Haram's emergence, demands, and modus operandi. It also evaluates how the Nigerian government has responded to the group's threat and how they should respond. The socioeconomic approach of this article helps to explain the Boko Haram problem beyond a usual religious agenda and to evaluate the development of the group in the context of Nigeria's checkered political history and local economic grievances.
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| 5 |
ID:
133656
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| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Much of the recent research on civil war treats explanations rooted in political and economic grievances with considerable suspicion and claims that there is little empirical evidence of any relationship between ethnicity or inequality and political violence. We argue that common indicators used in previous research, such as the ethno-linguistic fractionalization (ELF) and the Gini coefficient for income dispersion, fail to capture fundamental aspects of political exclusion and economic inequality that can motivate conflict. Drawing on insights from group-level research, we develop new country-level indices that directly reflect inequalities among ethnic groups, including political discrimination and wealth differentials along ethnic lines. Our analysis reveals that these theoretically informed country profiles are much better predictors of civil war onset than conventional inequality indicators, even when we control for a number of alternative factors potentially related to grievances or opportunities for conflict.
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