*New Date* Soldiers and Rebels: Coups and Civil Wars in Weakly Institutionalized and Fragmented States

Many ethnically divided societies are ridden with inter-ethnic conflicts which inhibit their economic development. Many scholars have advocated the adoption of “consensual” political institutions to facilitate the peaceful resolutions of ethnic conflicts in relatively mature democracies. In this paper, we argue instead that achieving social peace may require, in weakly institutional political environments, the transfer of de facto political power to opposition groups, for example, through their co-optation into the military. If the military is divided (i.e. formed by a plurality of ethnic groups) rather than unified (i.e. comprised by the same ethnic group that controls the government), the state can credibly commit to implement fiscal policies in line with the interests of a broad spectrum of social groups. This is because the groups whose interests are not served, but who have some de facto power generated by being part of the army, can pose a credible coup threat to the government. This credible threat induces the government to implement consensual policies, and therefore allows to smooth the underlying ethnic conflicts, preventing not only ethnic coups but also secessions and civil wars. Nevertheless, the strategy of ethnic balancing of the army is potentially risky, since it may induce the soldiers to attempt a preemptive coup in order to block the reform, as a reorganization of the military will reduce the rents of incumbent soldiers. One important message of our paper is that there may not be silver-bullet solutions to the problems caused by ethnic conflicts in weakly politicized societies, as it may prove difficult to reconcile the goal of preventing civil wars and secessions with the goal of preventing coups.

Andrea Vindigni is a Professor of Economics at IMT, Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies. He was previously an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Institute of International Economic (IIES) at Stockholm University and Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), and was a post-doctoral fellow at MIT, where he is a regular visitor.

Professor Vindigni's research interests focus on the political economy of a broad class of institutions. In particular, he has written on the political determinants of job protection legislation, the political economy of democratic constitutional choice, the effects of wars on political institutions and democratic transitions, and more recently on the political and economic origins of state power, military dictatorships and of religious beliefs and ideologies, in both analytic and comparative-historical perspective.

 

This talk is part of the Comparative Politics Workshop series, co-sponsored by The Europe Center.