Bringing War Back In: Victory and State Formation in Latin America

• In Event: The Dynamics of State-Building Across Time and Space

Abstract

Recent scholarship has argued that the "war made the state and the state made war'" paradigm has little to say about Latin America. According to this view, wars were not intense, nor were they sustained through taxation, so the origins of the state must be found elsewhere. Yet, states at the top of Latin America's hierarchy of state capacity waged and won the most intense amongst these wars. I propose the paradigm works if restated as "victory made the state, and the state made victory.'' In this article I exploit a considerable element of chance leading to particular war outcomes to identify the causal effect of losing a war. To do so I apply difference-in-differences analysis and synthetic control method to a panel of Latin America at the height of state formation (1865-1914). I find that defeat in international war had a considerable negative effect on different dimensions of state capacity, which diluted the overall state-making effects of war in this region. This suggests the need to reinterpret the findings of the bellocentrist approach in competitive environments like Europe where most losers died, introducing selection bias.

Author

• Luis Schenoni, University of Notre Dame