How State Presence Leads to Civil Conflict

• Author: Luwei Ying
• Date: 01 February 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0022002720957063
• Published date: 01 February 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

How State Presence

Leads to Civil Conflict

Luwei Ying

1

Abstract

Political scientists and policy-makers have long argued that state weakness leads to

civil conflict while enhancing state power helps prevent violence. Why, then, has

increased state capacity worldwide recently coincided with more civil conflicts? This

study argues that enhanced state presence at the sub-national level—a symptom of

growing state capacity—may induce violent resistance from the established non-

state powers such as local leaders and communities in the short term. Empirically,

I conduct two analyses, one at the province level and the other at the ethnic group

level. To measure state presence, I use accuracy of census data in the first analysis

and global ground transportation data in the second analysis. Results demonstrate

that increased state presence triggers civil conflict, particularly in the first five years

of such increasing state presence, and this effect is stronger in remote and ethnically

heterogeneous regions. Evidence also suggests that ethnic groups settled in per-

ipheral regions are prominent resisters to state penetration. This paper thus

expands prior understanding of the role of state power in civil conflicts.

Keywords

asymmetric conflict, capabilities, conflict, legitimacy, militarized disputes, use of force

International relations scholars have long argued that state weakness is a determinant

of political violence (Atzili 2010; Fearon and Laitin 2003; Jones 2008; Kaldor 2013;

Maitre 2009; Reinold 2011; Rotberg 2002; Tonwe and Eke 2013). According to this

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Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA

Corresponding Author:

Luwei Ying, Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis, Campus Box 1063, One

Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA.

Email: luwei.ying@wustl.edu

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2021, Vol. 65(2-3) 506-533

ªThe Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0022002720957063

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account, territory not governed by the state shelters rebel organizations. Further,

inability to fend off insurgents leaves the state no alternative but to bear the turmoil.

This dominant theory has largely motivated the United Nations to focus on building

state capacity in combating violence (UN 2006). The fact that over the past three

decades the average taxes to GDP ratio has increased a whole percentage point (from

13.9%to 15.1%) indicates that the overall state capacity has grown globally.

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Why

then did the number of insurgent incidents per year triple (from around 1,500 to

around 5,000) over the same period?

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Why does the increasing state capacity seem

not to bring peace as expected?

This paper offers one potential explanation by disentangling the relationship

between state power projection and civil conflict at the sub-national level.

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While

most previous literature studies state capacity at the country level, state pres-

ence—also termed as state penetration or state reach—is in essence a spatial

phenomenon. States do not govern each local area equally well at any given time

(Boone 2012; Koren and Sarbahi 2018; Lee 2018; Steinberg 2018). I argue that

the overall increasing state capacity enables and incentivizes the state to govern

the previously ungoverned or poorly governed regions. Such enhanced state

presence often provokes the local non-state powers and can trigger civil conflict

in the short term. The effect is particularly likely in peripheral regions where

residents are concentrated disadvantaged ethnic groups. This unintended conse-

quence of state presence may account for the higher levels of violence taking

place in these regions.

These arguments speak to a larger debate on the global trend of armed conflict

and the role that state capacity plays in it (Gohdes and Price 20 13; Lacina and

Gleditsch 2013; Pinker 2011; Sarkees, Wayman, and Singer 2003; Scott 2010).

Noticing that ungoverned spaces have started to disappear as state capacity grows

after World War II, Scott (2010) raises a caveat that clashes may occur between the

peasant communities and the intrusive state. While the views represented by Pinker

(2011) may be right that increasing state capacity decreases violence over hundreds

of years, the current paper, aligning with Scott (2010), indicates that short-term

expansion of state presence does indeed come with a backlash.

I conduct two sets of analyses to demonstrate the proposed effect of state pres-

ence. The first analysis is at the first-level administrative units, e.g. provinces.

Following Lee and Zhang (2016), I use the accuracy of census data as a proxy for

state presence, which covers seventy-four countries across twenty-five years. The

periodic nature of census allows me to calculate the change of state presence over

time. The civil conflicts concerned here are those that fall within each province in

the years subsequent to the census. The second analysis is at the ethnic group level.

I collect global ground transportation data (road and railroad) and overlay it with the

settlement patterns of politically relevant ethnic groups with Geographical Informa-

tion System (GIS). This constitutes a measure of state presence in relation to indi-

vidual ethnic groups. Multiple data sources

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identify the conflict incidents for which

each ethnic group claims responsibility.

Ying 507