The Political Legacies of Violence

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

In the past few years, there has been a great deal of interest among political scientists in the long-durée legacies of violence. This panel groups the latest iteration of papers on this important subject. Two of the papers — by Rachel Schwartz on Guatemala and Shom Mazumder on the U.S. South — explore the institutional legacies of exposure to violence. Schwartz shows how corrupt fraud schemes that were first set up by the army during the Guatemalan Civil War persisted into the post-war period despite massive institutional reforms. Mazumder examines the dynamics of the civil war era convict lease system to demonstrate how this practice gave rise to the policy of mass incarceration a century later. The other two papers concern the impact of state repression on the battlefield loyalty of troops and the mechanisms by which legacies of violence persist within communities. The paper by Rozenas, Talibova, and Zhukov leverages a unique dataset matching information about the intensity of Stalinist repressions in specific localities to individual-level data on Soviet Army’s soldiers’ places of origin and their behavior on the battlefield during World War II. The authors find that those who came from locations that experienced most repression had the lowest levels of battlefield resolve. Peisakhin and Queralt explore what effect the repression of Catholic priests by the Nazis in the 1930s had on post-war support for the CSU (a rightist Catholic party) in the post-WWII period. They find that repression of elites in the past results in an outpouring of mass support for these elites’ causes later on.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 11: Comparative Politics

Individual Presentations

• The Institutional Legacies of Wartime Predation: Evidence from Guatemala - Rachel A Schwartz, Tulane University

• From the Battlefield to the Cottonfield: Origins of Mass Incarceration - Shom Mazumder, Harvard University

• Mass Repression to Mass Warfare: Great Terror and Soviet Military Performance - Roya Talibova, University of Michigan; Yuri M. Zhukov, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Arturas Rozenas, New York University

• Role of Elites in the Formation of Enduring Political Loyalties - Leonid V. Peisakhin, New York University - Abu Dhabi; Didac Queralt, Yale University

Chair

• Livia Isabella Schubiger Duke University

Discussant

• Jason Lyall Dartmouth College