Militancy Among Minority Groups: the Protection-Group Policing Dynamic
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Militancy Among Minority Groups: The Protection-Group Policing Dynamic Word Count: 12,000 Saurabh Pant∗ University of Essex October 7, 2020 Abstract When does militancy emerge among minorities? This paper presents an understudied but important dynamic and develops a formal model illustrating how the state can influence minority militant mobilization. In many contexts, minorities face the threat of indiscriminate retaliation from non-state sources if violent transgressions are committed by someone from their community. Insufficient protection from this threat incentivizes minority members to police their group in order to prevent militancy from emerging within their community. The actions and characteristics of the state shape these perceptions of protection. Therefore, the strategic tensions in this protection-group policing dynamic occur within the minority group and between the minority group and the state. I thus develop a formal model to study how the interaction between state capacity and state willingness - two important aspects of the state - can influence the onset of minority militancy through this dynamic. The model can account for the variation in the extent and types of militancy that would emerge. Through the protection-group policing dynamic, the model counterintuitively demonstrates how low-capacity states can provide less conducive environments for minority militancy than high-capacity states, and it provides a new explanation for why small-scale militancy is more likely in higher capacity states. ∗I would like to thank Daniela Barba Sanchez, Michael Becher, Mark Beissinger, Kara Ross Camarena, Thomas Chadefaux, Casey Crisman-Cox, Matias Iaryczower, Amaney Jamal, Danielle Jung, Amanda Kennard, Nikitas Konstantinidis, Jennifer Larson, Andrew Little, Philip Oldenburg, Robert Powell, Kristopher Ramsay, Peter Schram, Jacob Shapiro, Sondre Solstad, Karine Van Der Straeten, Keren Yarhi- Milo, and Deborah Yashar for helpful comments. Between 2017 and 2020, earlier versions of this paper were presented in various research seminars at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse; the annual conferences of ISA, MPSA, EPSA, and APSA; and the Formal Models of International Relations conference. All remaining errors are mine. Militant mobilization across marginalized minority populations has not been uniform. There are cases where long-lasting, substantial militancy arose such as in the Catholic population in Northern Ireland from the mid to late twentieth century, and there are also cases where little militancy emerged such as with the African American population in the early post-Civil War South. Muslims are a minority in India and the United Kingdom (UK) and we also see differences in their rates of militant mobilization. In 2017, the UK’s MI5 Chief stated the UK was “facing the most severe terror threat ever” from Islamist terrorism (Dodd, 2017). Yet, in the same year, Zakir Musa, a then high-level al-Qaeda operative in Kashmir, publicly scolded Indian Muslims for not “joining jihad” (Singh, 2017). In fact, India has the second largest Muslim population in the world but only relatively negligible amounts of domestic and transnational Islamist militancy has emerged among this population.1 When does militancy emerge among members of marginalized minorities? This paper addresses this question by presenting an understudied but relevant dynamic and developing a formal model to illustrate the political conditions influencing the onset of minority militancy. In many contexts, minorities face the threat of indiscriminate retaliation from non-state sources if violent transgressions are associated with someone from their community (e.g., Muslims in India, Jews in 19th century and early 20th century Europe, and African Americans in the early post-civil war South). The extent that a minority group is protected from the threat of indiscriminate retaliation would influence the actions of minority group members toward militancy. If there is little protection, then minority group members would want to avoid the indiscriminate retaliation and would thus be more incentivized to police their group in order to prevent militancy from emerging within their community. In fact, even alleged violent transgressions as opposed to confirmed actual 1See Supplementary Information (SI hereafter). 1 transgressions can be enough to provoke a response. The 2002 Gujarat riots, for instance, was triggered by rumors of alleged Muslim involvement in the Godhra train burning. If alleged transgressions are sufficient to trigger a response, then a credible threat exists and the minority group would be increasingly incentivized to police their group in order to prevent or at least minimize the frequency of such indiscriminate retaliation events.2 Therefore, there is a link between the perceptions of protection of the minority group and the amount of in-group policing that occurs within the minority group, and, additionally, the actions and characteristics of the state can shape these perceptions of protection. I call this link the “protection-group policing dynamic.” In this dynamic, there are strategic tensions occurring within the minority group and between the minority group and the state. I thus develop a formal model that incorporates these strategic tensions and examines how state capacity and state willingness interact in influencing the extent and type of militancy emerging among minorities. The model I propose differs from the in-group policing model of Fearon and Laitin (1996) as I explicitly model the state as a key actor (rather than just in the background) in the protection-group policing dynamic that determines the amount of in-group policing and, consequently, the amount of inter-group violence that emerges.3 The level of state capacity constrains the amount of resources available to the government and, given a level of capacity, we need to consider how willing the government is to invest in making the minority feel secure (Wilkinson, 2004). Therefore, both state capacity and state willingness are characteristics of the state that influence minority militant mobilization. After the state has made its choices to create the political environment, the minority group 2If rumors were sufficient to give rise to indiscriminate retaliation, then minority members would be increasingly circumspect about their everyday behavior and their group members’ behavior. 3“Further development of our informational approach would require fuller consideration of the state’s role in both cauterizing and fostering interethnic violence.” (Fearon and Laitin, 1996, p.731) 2 members would strategically interact with each other in deciding which actions to take with regards to militancy. Through accounting for the protection-group policing dynamic, we can explain the variation in the amount of militancy and the type of militancy emerging across different types of states. The model reveals counterintuitively how a low-capacity state can actually provide a less conducive environment for militancy to emerge among minorities than a high-capacity state if the threat of indiscriminate retaliation to the minority group is enhanced which encourages in-group policing. Additionally, the model suggests that small-scale militant operations are more likely to emerge in high-capacity states which is consistent with findings in the related literature (Bueno de Mesquita, 2013; Carter, 2015; Wright, 2017). However, I provide a different explanation for this phenomenon stemming from the protection-group policing dynamic where the fear of indiscriminate retaliation in low-capacity states discourages people from being silent witnesses to militant acts. Furthermore, the model also accounts for factors associated with other existing frameworks to explain political violence, and shows how the protection-group policing dynamic is related to these other factors. First, psychological mechanisms (e.g., grievances from relative deprivation; see Gurr, 1970) are incorporated in the model through influencing the benefits of militancy to the minority members. However, high grievances are shown to be insufficient for political violence to emerge if little protection is provided against the threat of indiscriminate retaliation. Second, social networks (e.g., Atran, 2010; Staniland, 2014; Porta, 2015; Scacco, 2017; Larson and Lewis, 2018) matter in this model in that who is linked to who in a community can have implications for militant outcomes. This suggests that under the threat of indiscriminate retaliation, if one’s actions are more likely to be observed by different types of people then this can increase the deterrence effect of in-group policing. Finally, changes in the opportunity cost of militancy against the 3 state can make political violence more or less appealing (Grossman, 1991; Enders and Sandler, 2002; Collier and Hoeffler, 2002, 2004; Miguel, Satyanath and Sergenti, 2004; Humphreys, 2005; Rosendorff and Sandler, 2010; Dube and Vargas, 2013; Bazzi and Blattman, 2014). Moreover, the ability of the government to respond forcefully also influences the strategies of groups (Crenshaw, 1981; McAdam, 1982; Li, 2005; Carter, 2016). The opportunity cost of violence is seen as greater in higher capacity states which means, intuitively, that political violence should be lower in higher capacity states. Yet, the model in this paper shows counterintuitively how, through enhancing the threat of indiscriminate retaliation which encourages in-group policing, low-capacity states can actually create conditions