Dancing in the Dark: Information Challenges and State Allocation of Force in Civil Conflict
University of Michigan
Abstract:
Governments can use a variety of armed forces in civil war, including devolving violence to local unregulated actors even when they have regular armed forces available. To understand why states develop these risky security arrangements, I disaggregate the information challenges governments confront in civil conflict and explore the advantages of different types of security forces. I argue that how the central government allocates security is influenced by the challenges it faces, from monitoring its own security forces to collecting information on rebel activities and the local environment. Governments confronted with isolated subpopulations will rely more on localized and unregulated armed forces, who are better positioned to collect information on rebels within their communities. When needing to deploy troops far afield, governments mobilize more nationalized and regulated forces. I use novel panel data on internal security forces in civil conflict to evaluate these claims; my findings show that countries with greater populations in autonomous territories are associated with less regulated armed forces, whereas more regulated and more nationalized armed forces increase with conflict’s distance from the capital. This project describes previously unacknowledged but critical variation in the information environment of the state. The type of information challenge, in turn, explains under what conditions governments rely on less regulated security arrangements.
Discussants:
Phil Arena, University of Essex
Ore Koren, University of Minnesota
Patricia Sullivan, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
OPSC Coordinator:
Emily Ritter, University of California Merced
Graduate Assistant:
Peter D. Carey II (University of California Merced)
