Televising Justice during War

• Published date: 01 April 2022
• Author: Austin L. Wright,Stephen Stapleton,Andres Uribe
• DOI: 10.1177/00220027211047267
• Date: 01 April 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

2022, Vol. 66(3) 529 –552

Televising Justice

during War

Stephen Stapleton

1

, Andres Uribe

2

,

and Austin L. Wright

1

Abstract

Television is an overlooked tool of state building. We estimate the impact of tele-

vising criminal proceedings on public use of government courts to resolve disputes.

We draw on survey data from Afghanistan, where the government used television as

a mechanism for enhancing the legitimacy of formal legal institutions during an

ongoing conflict. We find consistent evidence of enhanced support for government

courts among survey respondents who trust television following the nation’s first

televised criminal trial. We find no evidence that public confidence in other gov-

ernment functions (e.g. economy, development, corruption) improved during this

period. Our findings suggest that television may provide a means of building state

legitimacy during war and other contexts of competition between political

authorities.

Keywords

conflict resolution, trials, mass media, Afghanistan, natural experiments

Civil war is, at its political core, a process of competitive state building. To establish

claims of legitimate authority, states and insurgents compete both militarily and

politically. Scholarship on civil war suggests these levels of competition are deeply

intertwined: coercive success engenders political legitimacy, while effective popular

governance fosters the civilian support necessary for military success in irregular

1

Harris School of Public Policy, The University of Chicago, IL, USA

2

Department of Political Science, The University of Chicago, IL, USA

Corresponding Author:

Austin L. Wright, Harris School of Public Policy, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.

Email: austinlw@uchicago.edu

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ªThe Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/00220027211047267

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Article

530 Journal of Conflict Resolution 66(3)

war (Kalyvas 2006). The latter mechanism creates a “market for governance,” where

civilians choose a governance provider to reward with loyalty. To that end, both

states and insurgents invest in stat e building, creating or improving gov ernance

institutions in a bid to win popular support (Berman and Matanock 2015; Stewart

2017).

Perhaps the most important of these institutions are mechanisms for dispute

resolution. Managing disputes and enforcing property rights are fundamental func-

tions of political authority. Disputes arise constantly in social life, where “every land

boundary, business deal, will, or loan risks giving rise to a costly disagreement or

dispute” (Blattman et al. 2014). Dispute resolution was vital to early processes of

statebuilding, in which European monarchs created courts to enforce property rights

and political order in exchange for taxation (Tilly 1985; Bates 2010). It remains vital

to modern would-be political authorities: a wide range of rebel groups create justice

institutions in areas they influence, from the Irish Republican Army in 1920 to Greek

Communist insurgents in 1942 and Syrian militants in 2015 (Kotsonouris 1994;

Kalyvas 2015; Arjona 2016).

Yet fostering legitimacy during war requires not just building institutions but

selling them. Television—and televised criminal proceedings in particular—may be

an effective means of enhancing the legitimacy of dispute resolution institutions

during conflict (Warren 2014). Television news has been shown to shape public

preferences for punitive justice (Gilliam Jr and Iyengar 2000). Televised trials may

also “ensure that no one could see the end result [of judicial proceedings] as arbitrary

rather than reasonable and justifiab le” (Mutz 2007). Raising awareness of le gal

institutions has been shown to increase their perceived legitimacy in a number of

contexts (Gibson, Caldeira, and Baird 1998).

Our central argument is that televised legal proceedings can enhance the ability

of the government to compete with other mechanisms for resolving disputes.

Unlike canonical tools of statebuilding—militaries and tax bureaucracies capable

of subjugating and extracting wealth from conquered subjects—dispute resolution

institutions do not always impose themselves on citizens. If citizens do not use such

institutions, they may not be aware of their existence, capabilities, or quality. This

poses a challenge to would-be statebuilders: for successful trials to increase con-

sumption of dispute resolution institutions, the signal they send requires

amplification. Beyond successfully fulfilling the function of dispute resolution,

states must communicate the process and outcomes of important trials. Mass media

make this possible. Newspaper stories, radio and television reports, and live broad-

casts of trials allow states to widely disseminate signals of capacity and intention to

their populations. This information dissemination, we argue, is as essential for

statebuilding as dispute resolution institutions themselves.

Using the unexpected timing of Afghanistan’s first televised criminal trial and

survey data collected before and after the trial, we provide the first evidence that

televised trials may enhance the legitimacy of judicial institutions during an ongoing

insurgency.

1

We find no evidence that public confidence in other government

2Journal of Conflict Resolution XX(X)