Food,state power,and rebellion: The case of maize

Why do rebellions occur and persist in some countries but not in others? Evidence shows that natural resources affect the fighting capacity of rebel groups; yet, by focusing on lucrative resources that are rare in most rebellion-afflicted countries, such as oil and diamonds, scholars neglected one necessary input for rebellion: staple crops. Focusing on maize, the world’s most prevalent staple, this study argues that, as one of the most important resources for rebel groups, maize can have a destabilizing effect on the state’s ability to thwart rebellion. These claims are corroborated statistically on a new time-varying, high-resolution global dataset of staple crop productivity, and then qualitatively through an analysis of archival records on the Mau Mau rebellion. In identifying an overlooked, global linkage between agricultural abundance, state capacity, and intrastate violence, this study explains strong geographical and temporal variations in rebellions at both the subnational and global levels.     

Military Structure,Civil Disobedience,and Military Violence

In this article, I argue that factors inherent to the structure of a military organization and their relationship with the political leadership play a role in the organization's tendency to perpetrate violence against civilians during civil disobedience campaigns. To examine this hypothesis, I conducted a three-phased statistical analysis on a database containing 97 campaigns that took place between 1972 and 2012. In the first phase, I examined the relationship between military centric factors and violent crackdowns. In the second phase, I examined the relationship between military centric factors and mass killing. In the third stage, I examined the relationship between two specific types of discrimination in the military and mass killing. I found strong evidence supporting the hypothesis mentioned above. High-risk militaries that served a militarized regime, contained loosely regulated or indoctrinated paramilitaries, and discriminated against the protesting group, were much more likely to perpetrate violence against civilians during civil disobedience campaigns than low-risk militaries. The conclusions of this study suggest that further examination of the military's role in perpetrating violence against civilians during protests and conflict may provide some novel findings.