Repression by Proxy

• Author: Kristine Eck
• Published date: 01 August 2015
• Date: 01 August 2015
• DOI: 10.1177/0022002715576746
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Repression by Proxy:

How Military Purges and

Insurgency Impact the

Delegation of Coercion

Kristine Eck

1

Abstract

Why do regimes delegate authority over a territory to nonstate militias, in effect

voluntarily sacrificing their monopoly over the use of violence? This article argues

that two factors increase the probability of states delegating control to a proxy

militia, namely, military purges and armed conflict. Military purges disrupt

intelligence-gathering structures and the organizational capacity of the military. To

counteract this disruption, military leaders subcontract the task of control and

repression to allied militias that have the local intelligence skills necessary to manage

the civilian population. This argument is conditioned by whether the state faces an

armed insurgency in a given region since intelligence, control, and repression are

needed most where the state is being challenged. This hypothesis is tested on unique

data for all subnational regions within Myanmar during the period 1962 to 2010 and

finds that proxy militias are more likely to be raised in conflict areas after military

purges.

Keywords

civil wars, conflict, domestic politics, human rights, internal armed conflict, rebellion,

war

1

Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

Corresponding Author:

Kristine Eck, Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University, Box 514, Uppsala 75120,

Sweden.

Email: kristine.eck@pcr.uu.se

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2015, Vol. 59(5) 924-946

ªThe Author(s) 2015

Reprints and permission:

sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0022002715576746

jcr.sagepub.com

A key component of most conceptions of the state is that it claims a monopoly on the

use of physical force (Weber [1919] 1946) and that by delegating power to a single

Leviathan (Hobbes [1651] 2012), security is increased through the reduction of anar-

chic and decentralized coercive actors. But scholars of statebuilding and civil unrest

note the empirical phenomenon that states often divest themselves of their monopoly

on the use of force to empower other armed actors. Often labeled pro-government

militias (PGM), these armed groups can take sole or partial responsibility for the use

of state-authorized coercion in territorially delimited areas. A burgeoning literature

has begun to address why states make this choice and what effect it has on the

deployment of violence.

This article focuses on the former, that is, why do states delegate authority to

militias that acts as proxy agents? Previous research has found that states which are

consolidated autocracies or democracies are less likely to employ PGM (Carey,

Colaresi, and Mitchell 2015). In unpacking this result, it is interesting to look at dif-

ferent types of regimes. Existing literature on autocratic regimes, and military

regimes in particular, assumes that they will jealously maintain their monopoly on

the use of force and act against those who challenge this monopoly (Linz 2000;

Geddes 1999), making the use of proxy militias or paramilitaries

1

within military

regimes counterintuitive. Why would the military allow or even encourage the for-

mation of armed actors when their existence undermines the raison d’eˆtre of the mil-

itary apparatus and when they may turn their weapons on the regime?

I argue that two factors will increase the probability of states delegating control to

a proxy militia, namely, military purges and armed conflict. In countries where the

state’s authority rests on the use of repression and intimidation, purges within the

military influence the state’s ability to gather information at the local level and

manage security. The apparatus is destabilized when military dictatorships remove

portions of its staff through purges. Given the sudden shock to the apparatus—

particularly its intelligence component—the military will have incentives to sub-

contract control, at least temporarily, to local armed actors in order to compensate

for the stress on the organization. But the extent to which leaders will deem it use-

ful to subcontract control in a given territory should be conditional on the level of

threat. In parts of the country that experience armed resistance, decision makers

will be more willing to delegate control to proxy militias and accept the risks that

doing so entails. The driving hypothesis of this article is thus that conditional on

the presence of armed conflict, a military purge will increase the likelihood of the

state delegating power to a proxy militia.

To investigate this hypothesis, this article leverages unique subnational data on

militia formation for one country, Myanmar, during the period 1962 to 2010.

2

To

analyze the argument, this article also uses original data on purges of the military

throughout the period. The results find support for the hypothesis, that is, conditional

on conflict, military purges are correlated with a higher likelihood of the state enga-

ging a proxy militia for local control of the populace. The findings underscore the

importance of military organization in understanding substitution patterns between

Eck 925