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

100%

Krakowski K.

Politologická revue (Czech Political Science Review)

2016

issue 1

97-116

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.

Heroes or Thieves? Nepotism, Clientage and Paramilitary Violence in Hungary, 1919–1921

72%

Bodó B.

Střed. Časopis pro mezioborová studia Střední Evropy 19. a 20. století. / Centre. Journal for Interdisciplinary Studies of Central Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

2015

vol. 7

issue 1

66-114

This article has examined the motives of the leaders and rank-and-file of the two most important paramilitary groups in Hungary during the counterrevolution. It has shown that the atrocities committed against middleclass Jews were primarily motivated by greed, rather than ethnic and religious hatred or anti-Communist sentiments. Paramilitary violence was conditioned by economic collapse and the “retreat of the state” and its loss of monopoly on violence. Many individuals and social groups also used the militias to achieve their long-term goals: to put pressure on law makers to pass anti-Semitic legislation, which would limit the number of Jewish students admitted to universities and control their share in the various professions. Paramilitary violence can thus be perceived as not only as a product of economic collapse, social chaos, and the “retreat of the state”: it was also part and parcel of a social strategy aimed at the redistribution of wealth, life-chances, power and influence. Finally, article has argued that the defeat of the militia movement in Hungary was due to its leaders’ lack of political talent and the slow restoration of law and order under the conservative government of István Bethlen in the early 1920s.

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1 Politologická revue (Czech Political Science Review)

1 Střed. Časopis pro mezioborová studia Střední Evropy 19. a 20. století. / Centre. Journal for Interdisciplinary Studies of Central Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

1 Bodó B.

1 Krakowski K.

1 2016

1 2015

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

Heroes or Thieves? Nepotism, Clientage and Paramilitary Violence in Hungary, 1919–1921