Andrea Vindigni

“Soldiers and Rebels. Coups and Civil Wars in Weakly-Institutionalized and Fragmented States”

Abstract

Many ethnically divided societies are ridden with inter-ethnic conflicts which inhibit their economic development. Following Lijphart, many scholars have advocated the adoption of “consensual” political institutions to facilitate the peaceful resolutions of ethnic conflicts. In this paper, we argue that making institutions more consensual may not necessarily be the panacea for solving ethnic conflicts in weakly-institutionalized polities where de jure and de facto power do not coincide. Instead, we argue that social peace may be potentially pursued by transferring durably some de facto political power to the opposition groups, 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. formed mainly 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 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 not without risk, since it may induce the soldiers to attempt a preemptive coup in order to block the reform. This is because a reorganization of the military involves the dismissal of some soldiers, who lose the rents generated by the standard political moral hazard problem of the army. One important message of our paper is thus that there may not be silver-bullet solutions to the problems caused by ethnic conflicts in developing countries. In particular, it may be relatively difficult to reconcile the goal of preventing civil wars and secessions with the goal of preventing coups.