Economic Policies and Rebel Choices: A Comparative Perspective on Libya, Syria and Yemen

• Název práce v češtině: Hospodářské politiky a volba na straně povstalců: komparativní analýza Libye, Sýrie a Jemenu
• Název v anglickém jazyce: Economic Policies and Rebel Choices: A Comparative Perspective on Libya, Syria and Yemen
• Klíčová slova anglicky: Civil War, Economic Policies, Rebel Governance, Selectorate Theory, Comparative Case Studies, Legitimacy, Neopatrimonialism.
• Akademický rok vypsání: 2020/2021
• Typ práce: diplomová práce
• Jazyk práce: angličtina
• Ústav: Katedra bezpečnostních studií (23-KBS)
• Vedoucí / školitel: PhDr. JUDr. Tomáš Karásek, Ph.D.
• Řešitel: skrytý - zadáno vedoucím/školitelem
• Datum přihlášení: 25.01.2021
• Datum zadání: 25.01.2021
• Datum a čas obhajoby: 22.09.2021 08:00
• Místo konání obhajoby: Pekařská 16, JPEK312, 312, Malá učebna, 3.patro
• Datum odevzdání elektronické podoby: 26.07.2021
• Datum proběhlé obhajoby: 22.09.2021
• Oponenti: Mgr. Martin Laryš, Ph.D.

Seznam odborné literatury

V. Preliminary Bibliography

Addison, T., Le Billion, P., Murshed, M. (2002) Conflict is Africa: The Cost of Peaceful Behaviour. Journal of African Economics, Volume 11, Issue 3, September 2002, pp. 365-386.
Bueno de Mesquita, B., Smith, A. (2012) The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behaviour Is Almost Always Good Politics. Public Affairs.
Bjørnskov, C. (2005). Does Political Ideology Affect Economic Growth? Public Choice, 123(1-2), pp. 133–146.
Clapham, Christopher S. (1998) African Guerrillas. Indiana University Press.
Collier, P.; Hoeffler, A. (2000). Greed and Grievance in Civil War. Policy Research Working Paper, No. 2355. World Bank, Washington, DC. World Bank.
Duranti, A.; Goodwin, C. (1992) Rethinking Context: Language as an interactive phenomenon. London, Cambridge University Press.
Engestrom, Y. (1987) Learning by Expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to o developmental research. Helsinki, Orienta-Konsultit.
Gaprindashvili, G. (2017) The Role of Government’s Economic Policy in Country’s Economic Development. Journal association 1901 “SEPIKE”, Edition 18.
George, A.L., Bennett, A. (2005) Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences, Center for Sciences and International Affairs, Harvard University.
Goldschmidt, W. (1966) Comparative Functionalism. University of California Press.
Grunewald, F. (1997) Économie Des Guerres Civiles, Sous La Direction De François Jean Et Jean-Christophe Rufin, Hachette, Paris, 1996, 593 Pp.” Revue Internationale De La Croix-Rouge, vol. 79, no. 828, pp. 789–794.
Gupta, A.; Ferguson, J. (1997) Culture, power, place: Ethnography at the end of an era. In: GUPTA, Akhil; FERGUSON, James (Eds.). Culture, Power, Place: explorations in critical anthropology. Durham, NC: Duke.
Hoffmann, K.; Verweijen, J. (2018) Rebel Rule: A Governmentality Perspective. African Affairs, vol. 118, no. 471, pp. 352–374.
Kalyvas, Stathis N. (2012) Micro-Level Studies of Violence in Civil War: Refining and Extending the Control-Collaboration Model, Terrorism and Political Violence, 24:4, 658-668.
Jean-François Médard (1982) The Underdeveloped State in Tropical Africa: Political Clientelism or Neo-Patrimonialism? Page start 162; Page end: 192 in Clapham C.S, (1982) Private patronage and public power: political clientelism in the modern state. London, Pinter.
Jackson, Robert H. (1991) Quasi-States.
Lijphart, A. (1971) Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method. The American Political Science Review, Vol. 65, No. 3, September 1972, pp. 682-693.
Lindemann, S. (2008) Do Inclusive Elite Bargains Matter? A Research Framework for Understanding the Causes of Civil War in Sub-Saharan Africa. Development Studies Institute, Crisis State Discussion Papers, February 2008.
Mampilly, Zachariah C. (2015) Rebel Rulers: Insurgent Governance and Civilian Life during War. Cornell University Press.
Maxwell, Joseph A. (2013) Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach. Sage Publishing.
McGee, T. (2014) The Stateless Kurds of Syria. Ethnic Identity and National I.D. University of Exeter, UK.
Mill, John, S. (2012) A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive. Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence, and Methods of Scientific Investigation. Cambridge University Press.
Nathan, L. (2005) Frightful Inadequacy of Most of the Statistics”: A Critique of Collier and Hoeffler on Causes of Civil War. Crisis States Development Research center, Discussion Paper No. 11.
Olson, M. (1993) “Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development.” The American Political Science Review, vol. 84, no. 3, Sept. 1993, pp. 567–576.,
Rubin, Michael A. (2018) Rebel Territorial Control, and Political Accountability in Civil War. Evidence from the Communist Insurgency in the Philippines, Columbia University.
Sack, R.D. (1986) Human territoriality: its theory and history. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Sobek, D. Payne, Caroline L. (2010) A Tale of Two Types: Rebel Goals and the Onset of Civil Wars, International Studies Quarterly, Volume 54, Issue 1, March 2010, pp. 213–240.
Terpstra, N., Frerks, G. (2017) Rebel Governance and Legitimacy: Understanding the Impact of Rebel Legitimation on Civilian Compliance with the LTTE Rule.” Civil Wars, vol. 19, no. 3, 2017, pp. 279–307.
Tilly, C. (1978) From Mobilization to Revolution. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Předběžná náplň práce v anglickém jazyce

I. Research Question and Research Hypothesis
Research Question: do economic policies of the state impact rebels’ legitimacy during a conflict?
The scope of this thesis is to assess whether the government’s economic policies impact rebel governance in civil wars. My interest is to analyse the competition between the economic policies of the state and the ones of rebels in wartime to answer the question: in wartime, do government economic policies impact rebels’ legitimacy?
Research Hypothesis: In neo-patrimonial political systems, if (a) the government economic policies promotes a centralized production model and exclusive elite bargains; if (b) the challenging rebel order is interested in altering the relations between society and the state; and if (c) the rebel order promotes a viable, alternative and inclusive governance model to those elites undermined by the state, then we can conclude there is a causal link between the government economic policies and rebels’ legitimacy.

II. Topic and Research Goals
In peacetimes, governments hold an active role in responding and influencing the economic circumstances of the state. While this holds true for both democratic, liberal and illiberal countries, the latter states are more concerned with preserving economic stability. To further the economic interests of selected elites, governments can decide to regulate some aspects of their economic activity to engineer economic growth (Gaprindashvili, 2017). To ensure this, policymakers have two main channels, fiscal and monetary policies, where monetary policies refer to those economic activities aimed at managing the money supplies and the use of credits, whereas fiscal policies refer to those maneuvers aimed at manipulating the allocation of taxes and government expenditures. Nevertheless, as Bjørnskov (2005) notes, economic policies are not a-political and political ideology has been significantly linked to economic growth, suggesting that a great part of politics can be understood by analyzing the economic agendas of the groups involved in the political process. By allocating economic resources to certain groups (and by the same logic depriving others of the same benefits), peacetime economic policies impact government public support. The choice of policy can make the government fall in and out of favor of those elites that can ensure continuity of the political institutions. As Bueno de Mosquita (2011) suggests in “The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics”, this is especially true in illiberal democracies where the political actors need to efficiently reward the essential coalition of supporters to maintain power. According to the literature on Rebel Governance (Terpstra, Frerks, 2017; Hoffmann, Verweijen, 2018; Mamphilly, 2015), once rebels become involved in governance and start behaving like rebel government they face similar legitimacy issues, as legitimacy from the elites provides sustainability and replicability of the rebel social order in time. Authors like Mamphilly (2015), Clamphman (1998), and Jackson (1991) observe that “recent ongoing conflicts (...) have witnessed the construction of elaborate systems for governing civilians by violent groups” (Jackson, 2015:2), suggesting that governance is not a limited attribute of the states, rather the control over social interaction by a legitimate actor. In Analyzing African insurgencies, Clamphman (1998) argues that “insurgent movements may for many purposes be regarded as quasi-states themselves, and they exercise many of the functions of the states” (Clamphman,1998:10), elite’s legitimacy becomes the dependent variable that I will be observing.
My research interest is to assess whether the state’s economic policies, understood by the OECD as Economic Governance that consist in “policies, laws, regulations, institutions, practices, and individuals that determine the context in which a country’s economic activity takes place” (Lewarne, Snelbecker, 2004:7) impact rebel economic choices in war times.
In order to address the research question, I would like to adopt the theoretical framework of neo-patrimonialism and employ a comparative case study methodology to observe the phenomenon of war economies, because their presence indicates the presence of governance by rebel organizations.

III. Theoretical Framework
The functional logic of neo-patrimonialism is that to ensure reciprocity between the legitimization of a leader as the head of an organization, and elites’ cooperation. The goal is for the organization to establish itself as the main distributor of patronage goods and services while enacting an effective control system to prevent the rising of rival groups with autonomous access to sources of power. The endurance of the system depends on the reciprocity between authority and distributive policies ensured by the control system, which secures elite’s cooperation. Therefore, the functioning of a patrimonial system necessitates: (I) elite cooperation, (II) distributive policies, and (III) a control system. Médard (1982) and the elitist approach argue that neo-patrimonialism allows to perceive the connection between political and economic spheres that become interchangeable, therefore making patrimonialism a heuristic approach as a theoretical concept. The choice of neo- patrimonialism as a theoretical framework is further justified by failure of other perspectives like the economic approach to account for the diversity of the rebel economic choices and for the stability of rebel’s orders (Nathan, 2005). Starting from Collier and Hoeffler work (2000) which most prominent finding - the relationship between natural resources and probability of civil wars - is not based on the analysis of rebel’s behavior, rather is drawn from the correlation between economic factors of states (primary commodities of countries, resource type and geographical placing of resources) and their civil war settings. To Addison, Le Billion and Murshed (2002) fine-tuning of Collier’ and Hoeffler (2000) theory in their empirical case study on African civil wars, who suggest that civil wars are durable because low-intensity conflicts have a greater pay-off than peace, the relationship between state economic policies and rebel’s legitimacy remains undertheorized. Therefore, an actor-centric approach that focuses also on these actor’s political agendas needs to be included in the analysis to account for the emergence of alternative socio-economic power arrangements to the one of the states. By adopting neo-patrimonialism as a theoretical framework, the first step in addressing the research question would be to (1) analyse the internal and external dimensions of the state economic system as suggested by Rufin (Grunewald, 1997) and (2) assess whether the logic of the state patronage system promotes an inclusive or exclusive dialogue with elites according to Lindemann elitist framework (Lindemann, 2008). 1. Rufin (1997) two dimension of analysis: - Internal dimension: How are local resources generated? How is the local economy organized? - External dimension: How are external contacts established? How does the exchange system function? 2. Lindemann (2008) framework distinguished inclusive vs. exclusive elite bargains models by observing different levels of elites access to (a) state structures (distribution of government jobs, distribution of parastatal jobs and distribution of jobs in the military sector), and (b) state resources (distribution of rents, distribution of land rights). Hypothesis 1: Centralized systems of production and exclusive elites bargain models promoted by the state are more likely to negatively impact the state legitimacy. A second step would consist of the analysis of rebel war economies, whether the rebel economic system represents an alternative to the one of the states, by using the same lenses adopted in the analysis of the state’s economic organization. A practical example would be to assess whether the centralized behavior of the Libyan Government, that virtually owns every business, infrastructure and social service in Libya as determined by the 1969 Constitutional declaration, has impacted rebel’s legitimacy. Haftar’s forces for their part have been implementing an alternative social and economic order that proposes a diversification of the economy by allowing actors different from the state to sell resources like oil and metal. In order to measure the extent of Rebel’s legitimacy and the appreciation of their policies by local elites, I will adopt Kalyvas (2012) control-collaboration model that assumes that the elite’s interests of securing their own survival and in maximizing access to basic goods and services enable strategic cooperation with rebels. As Rubin (2018) argues civil wars involve the competition between the state and rebel organizations for territory and political authority (usually) over a contested region. Nevertheless, as Tilly (1978) notices, rebel movements do not arise out of vacuum situations, rather suggests they are linked to the government polity mode they are subjected to. By defining those elites within the confines of the polity with low-cost access to state’s resources, and those with lesser access, the structure of the polity and the relationship of the government with the broader society will define the type of grievances and the choice of methods of those that fall short of the government favors. (Sobek, Payne, 2010) As an outcome, the state’s relationship with local communities both prior to and during civil war, shapes rebel-local elites’ interaction. This model assumes that negligible differences exist among local elites - in terms of political inclination, distribution policies, religious creed, ethnic formation and other preferences that could hinder cooperation - and suggest that these actors share a common interest in reducing the level of violence and minimizing the depletion of basic services and resources. (Rubin, 2018). In other words, if the first assessment of the government’s economic behavior would delineate the extent of the government polity by discerning those elites that enjoy low-cost access to the state’s resources, I argue that by the same logic the assessment also delineates those elites that fall short of it. By assuming that the latter elites have an interest in changing the status of their relationship with the state and that there are non-trivial disputes among them, the analysis of the rebel’s war economy would assess first, whether the rebel’s polity addresses the elites’ grievances, meaning that the interests of the elites fall somewhere within the boundaries of the new polity. And second, if the rebel system has means to maintain its viability in the future by assessing whether rebels aim at altering the relationship between state and society (war of legitimacy) or at replacing it (Sobek, Payne 2010). The model I propose suggests a causal relationship between rebels’ polities and their legitimation from elites. If rebels engage in civil wars of legitimacy (Sobek, Payne, 2010) and their proposed polity addresses the elite’s grievances, then rebel’s legitimacy can be inferred. Hypothesis 2: Rebel orders that promote inclusive bargain models and challenge the state to alter the relation between state and society are more likely to be legitimized by local elites as alternative systems to the one of the states. Somali militias and gangs that employ pillage, banditry, and extortion as means of sustenance don’t usually serve a functional purpose to those local elites that wish to alter the relationship with the central government. Although some forms of looting can have strategic purposes and can transform local security arrangements, looting remains a short-term strategy, as it can lead to exhaustion of resources (Mamphilly, 2015). Territoriality seems to have an important role in functionality (Sack, 1986). According to Olson (1993), in social contexts saturated by roving bandits there is little incentive for individuals and groups to produce and accumulate anything, thus, little to steal. Therefore, by seizing a territory, establishing itself as an exclusive ruler and by providing some threshold of order and public goods, stationary bandits arise because of self-interest of those able to monopolize violence in a given context (Olson, 1993). Hypothesis 3: Rebel orders that are capable of monopolizing violence over a given territory and can implement governance models are more likely to be legitimized by local elites as alternative systems to the one of the states. The third and final step would be to compare the selected cases and assess whether similarities and patterns can be traced in answering the research question: do the state economic policies impact rebels’ legitimacy in war times.

IV. Methodology
To address the research question, I intend adopting the comparative case study methodology (George, Bennett, 2005). This choice would allow me to conduct an in-depth examination of a single phenomenon, in this case elite bargains in civil conflicts, across different practical cases enabling me to draw similarities, differences and detect patterns among them. Comparative case studies as a research method of social sciences is more of a technique or an approach (Goldschmidt,1966) rather than a prescribed inquiry method with strict rules and processes. In other words, it does not designate a proper method, rather it allows inter-unit comparison (Lijphart, 1971). By doing so, comparative case studies serve great theoretical purposes because they focus on discovering “empirical relations among a few variables” (Lijphart, 1971:687), meaning that they have a probabilistic aim rather than a universal one. With their context-specific analysis and their incorporation of the actor’s perspective, comparative case studies allow researchers to omit marginal variables and focus on specifics of the case, overcoming the problem of “too many variables but too little cases” (Lijphart, 1971:687), an issue often raised in case studies (George, Bennett, 2005). To do so, the choice of cases is fundamental and should not be left up to chance. Not only by choosing similar cases, one can overcome the shortcomings suggested by Lijphart, but one can focus on the selected dependent variables without venturing off in negligible (cultural) differences (Mill, 2012). The scope of my thesis is to assess whether common patterns can be observed between the way that the Libyan, Syrian and Yemeni states organize their economic framework and the way in which elites choose to legitimize rebel orders as alternatives to the ones of the states. The comparative case study model serves my research interest because it allows me to isolate the dependent variables chosen a priori (economic policies and elites legitimacy) and focus on their relationship rather than to develop a prescriptive theory that accounts for an entire phenomenon (George, Bennett, 2005). This way the ideological, historical, and cultural differences between the Ba’athist regime, the Tripoli-based Dawn Coalition forces and the Saleh regime become non-trivial factors to my research question. For the sake of parsimony, this thesis will focus on the economic aspects of government policies, in particular on the monetary and fiscal policies of states, the distribution of rents and of land rights, employment policies, access to services and resources and the lack or extent of private investment, with regards to which elites these policies benefit.

V. Case Selection
This dissertation will compare the Libyan, the Syrian, and the Yemen conflict, to assess whether similarities exist in the way economic policies of the state impact rebel’s legitimacy during conflict. The choice of the three cases has been done upon considerations regarding the shortcomings of comparative case studies as suggested by Lijphart (1971). In the attempt to “focus on the comparative analysis on “comparable” cases” (Lijphart, 1971:687) I treat patrimonialism as the form of interaction between my two dependent variables: the economic policies of the state and rebel’s legitimacy. The geographical and historical (post-colonial, post-Arab spring) context of the civil wars and the socialist character of the regimes suggests the patrimonial character of the elite’s interaction with the state in the three cases, and the ongoing nature of the wars suggests the existence of a sustained war economy able to ensure the endurance of rebel orders. Nevertheless, despite the mentioned similarities in history, culture, and regional powers-projections the three cases also proffer substantial differences with each other offering variation of the surrounding factors that have led to the disruption of the state’s social fabric, which render these three cases optimal cases for a comparative case study.