1
Introduction
In the 70
’s and 80’s, there was widespread speculation in the international academic
literature that economic inequality leads to political violence. The almost immediate intuition
was that economic inequality increases political dissent which could cause violence. The
approaches to study this issue were very diverse, and the conclusions ambiguous.
On one side, economic inequality can really bring violence.
“When economic
inequality is high (I) the poor are envious, have nothing to lose, and thus resort to force to
achieve redistributive demands; (II) the rich are greedy, have nothing to lose, and possess the
resources necessary to use force to avoid giving in to redistributive demands; (III) the middle
class, which respects property rights, is small. Hence, as economic inequality increases, the
pool of conflict participants (both rich and poor) increases
” (Lichbach 1989, p.436). But, on
the other hand, economic inequality can decrease political dissent because high levels of
economic inequality are associated with powerful elites that will use all their influence to
repress political dissent (Lichbach 1989, pp.437-8).
The outcome measures on which these conclusions are based also seem very
contradictory. Scholars use different definitions and data, which can range from land
inequality, income inequality, different economic conditions faced by groups, and
discriminatory economic treatment by government.
Since revolutions and civil wars (the most extreme political violence emanates from
these domestic kinds of conflicts) are almost entirely rural phenomena, occurring in agrarian
and semi-agrarian countries and involving mainly peasants, the actual
“currency” to be talked
about is land, which represents both a problem and a solution. This is certainly one of the
main issues, and that
’s the approach I will use in this paper. Focusing through land, my
assumptions are that:
-
income inequality and poverty in the rural areas are the results of land inequality;
-
differentiation within peasants sub-groups is based on land ownership (if a specific
person owns land and how much he/she owns).
The actors involved are lower and upper class peasants. In the first group are landless
people (tenants, sharecroppers, migratory rural workers) and small owners (while their
leaders are often urban middle-high class intellectuals). The second group is represented by
large landowners allied with the state machine, often financing it. The large landlords have
great amount of political and economic power within the country.
My contribution, I hope, will be on the following issues:
(a)
Putting together different aspects of land tenure in one indicator, ranging
between the quiescent to the revolutionary peasant, by type. I will
investigate concentration of land and land inequality as a possible
reasonable explanation for violence eruption and civil war onset, with
demographic trends exacerbating competition for this scarce resource. I
will account for mobilization and recruitment of supporters and of fighters
for the rebel cause, with land reform as a possible solution to this problem;
(b)
Creating a set of hypotheses linking the land-related independent variables
of interest to the civil war onset, one small hole that was left intact in this
recent and already dense civil war quantitative literature;
(c)
Analyzing systematically the variables that were put together in one large
dataset, and indicate the associations that they may have;
Convention