Social Conflict and the Predatory State

Conventional wisdom and existing research suggest that a predatory state benefits from divide-and-rule politics, as competition among political factions distracts them from collective action against expropriation. Historically, however, predatory states vary in whether they seek to heighten or reduce internal tensions. Using a formal model, I develop a political economy theory of how social conflict affects the policy choices and overall revenue of a rent-seeking ruler. I show that the profitability of divide-and-rule politics depends critically on the nature of the state’s revenue base. Internal conflict does not just reduce subjects’ incentive to resist, but also to engage in economically productive activity. On the whole, a regime that taxes the products of the society’s labor will profit from promoting social order. Conversely, a state whose objective is to control a fixed stock of wealth, such as natural resources, benefits from internal divisions. ∗I thank Scott Abramson, Phil Arena, Jeff Arnold, Nicole Audette, Brett Benson, Cristina Bodea, Rob Carroll, Clifford Carrubba, Dave Conner, Tom Dolan, Mark Fey, Michael Gibilisco, Hein Goemans, Jeremy Kedziora, Bethany Lacina, Jeff Marshall, Jack Paine, Mattias Polborn, Kristopher Ramsay, Miguel Rueda, Peter Schram, Curt Signorino, Brad Smith, Matt Testerman, and Alan Wiseman for helpful discussions and comments. †Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Vanderbilt University. Email: brenton.kenkel@ vanderbilt.edu. The object of a predatory state, such as a colonial empire or a kleptocratic dictatorship, is to profit from power. Collective resistance by the subject population against a predatory regime or its extractive policies threatens the profitability of rule. Therefore, conventional wisdom at least since the Roman empire has held that a predatory state benefits from a policy of divide et impera, or divide and rule. When ethnic groups, religious factions, or other social subgroups are in conflict with each other, they have less time and manpower left over for collective resistance against government predation. Even in the absence of open conflict, the incentives for collective action may be weak in fractionalized societies (see Habyarimana et al. 2007), meaning ruling regimes face a relatively low internal threat to their position. Indeed, divide and rule has been a guiding policy for predatory regimes across time and space: military conquerors like Hernán Cortés in Mexico (Burkholder and Johnson 2015), global empires like the British in India (Banerjee, Iyer and Somanathan 2005), and contemporary kleptocrats as in the post-Soviet republics (Driscoll 2015). Yet not all predatory regimes exploit internal divisions. In fact, some do the opposite, promoting internal order over conflict. For example, when the Dutch East India Company arrived in the northern Sulawesi region of present-day Indonesia in the 17th century, the region was beset with raiding and other violence, largely between neighboring rival villages (Schouten 1998). Instead of encouraging and exploiting these conflicts, as a divide-and-rule theory of predatory regimes would predict, the Dutch sought to reduce looting and protect property rights. Warring parties regularly called on the Dutch to arbitrate their disputes, making the Company a kind of “stranger king” in Sulawesi society. And the Dutch found it in their interest to do so, as “any conflict quickly tended to interfere with the production and supply of the Minahasan rice which . . . formed the Company’s main economic interest in the area” (Henley 2004, 105). In other words, at least in Sulawesi, it did not pay to divide and rule. In this paper, I develop a theory to explain why predatory governments sometimes benefit from social order and other times prefer internal conflict. I develop the theory through a formal model of the predatory rule of a divided society. By predatory rule, I mean the government’s sole concern is