Communal Violence and Property Rights

In this examination of communal violence (intrastate armed conflict between two non-state groups), we examine the relationship between one aspect of state institutional strength—property rights protection (PRP) – and inequality between social groups. Using a contest success function model, we build in an assumption that increasing PRP reduces the effectiveness of appropriative effort, generally increasing the equilibrium allocation of productive effort. In addition, PRP is modeled as potentially biased in favor of one group, creating inequality between social groups. Adding this to the model produces a non-monotonic result with respect to increasing PRP. Specifically, if a society has a moderate level of PRP but some degree of bias away from equity, an increase in PRP can result in either a decrease or an increase in total appropriative effort. Thus, simply increasing PRP without addressing equity issues can increase the level of conflict in the society. We argue that this has implications for international organizations that encourage state governments to focus on strengthening property rights institutions without addressing the more sensitive issue of inequality. Paper prepared for presentation at the “Conflict and Cooperation Conference”, November 16-17, 2007, Ford Motor Company Center for Global Citizenship, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. This project has in part been funded by the Research Council of Norway and the EU 6th Framework project, “Polarization and Conflict”. We thank these organizations for their support. We thank Siri Camilla Aas Rustad for research assistance. 1 Inequality, Property Rights, and Communal Conflict Conflict between pastoral and sedentary agriculturalists dates back to the dawn of history. Herodutus writing in the Fourth Century B.C. in Ancient Greece described Sythian nomadic depredations. Even earlier conflict is recorded in Ancient Mesopotamia (Kuznar and Sedlmeyer, 2005). The endless struggles between the nomadic Bedouin and the fellahin (or peasants) of Arab societies have shaped the history of the Mideast (Smith, 1969). Much of rural SubSaharan Africa experiences such conflict today, from Namibia, to Tanzania, to Burkina Faso, to the Sudan (Derman, Odgaard, and Sjaastad, 2007). Indeed, an important element of the conflict in Dafur is one between pastoralists and sedentary agriculturalists (Kuznar and Sedlmeyer, 2005). The essential problem is that pastoralists require access to relatively large areas of land and tend to move their herds according to the seasons, ecology and weather changes. Such activities almost inevitably mean that they and sedentary agriculturalists come into competition over land and water. It is this competition that serves as the basis for armed violence between different communities. The role of property rights (particularly with regard to land and water) plays a central aspect to the conflict. The conflict between the homesteaders and the cattlemen in the American West is exemplary. This was not an ethnic conflict, but one of contested notions of property. It was a conflict over access to open range land versus staked out claims of private property. It was also a contest for support from the government, for state protection of two fundamentally different notions of property and land use. We shall return to this case after we present our model of inequality and private property protection. Not much has been written about property rights protection and intrastate armed conflict. In contrast, two of the most commonly debated factors regarding civil conflict are inequality and state strength. Most analysis of the role of inequality in explaining the onset of intrastate conflict has not found a very robust relationship. Many more quantitative studies have been conducted on the likelihood or level of conflict between a rebel group and the government of a state than on communal violence. Among the causes of civil conflict, state strength and inequality are two concepts discussed by many researchers. The hypotheses as generally stated for these two concepts on internal conflict are as follows: Greater state strength reduces internal conflict; and independently, greater inequality increases the likelihood and/or severity of internal conflict. The arguments generating these hypotheses vary from researcher to researcher, but the hypotheses are similar. Empirical results are mixed. State strength, while variously measured, seems to have a consistent effect (Fearon and Laitin, 2003; Hegre and Sambanis, 2006). Inequality, however, has sometimes been found to have a significant