State capacity and violence in civil war: Counterintuitive evidence from Colombia

• Authors: Krakowski Krzysztof
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The paper analyses the relationship between state capacity and political violence with reference to the Colombian civil war. It disaggregates the concept of state capacity into three components: non-violent, routine violent, and extra-ordinary violent ones. Theoretically speaking, each of them may have a different effect on insecurity. The standard argument in political conflict literature proposes that violence in civil war increases with the weakness of the state. Such a claim implies that an increase in state capacity should reduce conflict-related insecurity. Econometric analyses of municipal-level data from Colombia show that this conjuncture need not be true. The paper demonstrates that the rapid increase in the extra-ordinary violent capacity of the state on the Colombian Pacific Coast nearly doubled the amount of non-state political violence in the region between 2003 and 2009.

Keywords

EN

civil conflict; Colombia; paramilitary groups; state capacity; violence

Discipline

• POLITICAL_SCIENCES: POLITICAL SCIENCES

• Publisher: Czech Political Science Association, Czech Republic
• Journal: Politologická revue (Czech Political Science Review)
• Year: 2016
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 97-116

Contributors

author

Krakowski Krzysztof