Short- and Long-Term Implications of Violence for State/Society Relations

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

How does exposure to violence shape citizens’ relationships with their own governments? A proliferation of recent studies have documented the surprisingly positive effects of violence on altruism, empathy, and political participation. But as informative as these studies have been, they teach us little about the implications of violence for most aspects of citizen/state relations, and generally leave the mechanisms connecting violence to citizen attitudes and behavior under-specified. The four papers on this panel offer new theory to explain the effects of violence on citizen/state relations, drawing on a variety of disciplines and traditions, including political theory, social psychology, and the empirical conflict literatures in political science and economics. The papers test their theories using a rich and varied combination of methodologies, including ethnography, interviews, surveys, survey experiments, and behavioral games. The papers address both the short-term and long-term implications of violence for citizens’ relationships with state authority, and explore the effects of both direct (e.g. wartime assaults) and indirect (e.g. witnessing wartime assaults) victimization across four disparate conflict and post-conflict settings. Together, the papers teach us that while exposure to violence may diminish citizens’ trust in government in the short term, it does not erode their perceptions of state legitimacy in the long run. Indeed, if anything, citizens who are victimized during periods of conflict may be more rather than less likely to demand state-provided security and justice in the post-conflict period. The papers also confirm that exposure to violence catalyzes political protest, but they clarify the mechanisms connecting these two phenomena, and show that emotions like empathy are crucial but often overlooked links in the causal chain.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 21: Conflict Processes

Individual Presentations

• Government Legitimacy Amid Conflict: Evidence from the D.R. Congo - Augustin Bergeron; Gabriel Tourek; Jonathan Weigel

• (Re)Building the Social Contract After Violence: Perspectives from CAR - Milli Lake, London School of Economics

• Empathy and Civic Action amidst Violence: Experimental Evidence from Mexico - Rebecca V. Bell-Martin, Tecnologico de Monterrey

• Civil War and Compliance with State Authority: Evidence from Liberia - Robert A. Blair, Brown University

Chair

• Robert A. Blair Brown University

Discussants

• Kristin Marie Bakke University College London

• Christopher Rickard Mr