Abstract:

This article aims to explain the 2011 Tunisian transition by offering a historical institutional and a game-theoretic analysis of how the army played a crucial role in the fall of Ben Ali’s regime. What is the rationality behind the military’s decision to refuse Ben Ali’s order to open fire on the demonstrators? Why did the Tunisian army repressed protesters in the revolt of the Gafsa Mining Basin in 2008, and refused to do so in the decisive uprising of 2011? How to explain the speed at which the Tunisian regime fell? It is argued that the balance of power on the field was such that the army was better-off to back the population and used a strategic entry point to bring a decisive “coup” to the regime. The high degree of institutionalization of the Tunisian army is seen as a precondition to make such an independent decision. The army’s commitment to back the population constituted a strong signal to the protesters as well as to foreign allies, causing a rapid fall of the Tunisian dictatorship. This paper offers the first analysis applying game theory to explain the 2011 Tunisian transition and, more precisely, the interactions between Ben Ali’s regime and the army. While several analyses focus on the unprecedented popular mobilization to explain Ben Ali’s fall, only a few authors attempted to explain the role of the militaries. However, while they emphasize on the “disdain” of the army towards the regime, we, instead, claim that the rationality of one of the most professional army of the region to understand how and why the militaries refused to repress demonstrators in the 2011 national protests. 

Abstract:

Why have militarized interventions to curtail violence by drug cartels had wildly divergent results? In the past six years, state crackdowns drove a nine-fold increase in cartel-state violence in Mexico, versus a two-thirds decrease in Brazil. Prevailing analyses of drug wars as a criminal subtype of insurgency provide little traction, because they elide differences in rebels’ and cartels’ aims. Cartels, I argue, fight states not to conquer territory or political control, but to coerce state actors and influence policy outcomes. The empirically predominant channel is violent corruption— threatening enforcers while negotiating bribes. A formal model reveals that greater state repression raises bribe prices, leading cartels to fight back whenever (a) corruption is sufficiently rampant, and (b) repression is insufficiently conditional on cartels’ use of violence. Variation in conditionality helps explain observed outcomes: switching to conditional repression pushed Brazilian cartels into nonviolent strategies, while Mexico’s war “without distinctions” inadvertently made fighting advantageous.

Abstract:

The state’s central function is to establish authority through its monopoly on violence; the very attempt, however, can be counterproductive. Punishment incapacitates and deters individuals, but can empower destructive collective forces. Prison gangs, their ranks swelled by mass incarceration, transform the core of the coercive apparatus into a headquarters for organizing and taxing streetlevel criminal activity, supplanting state authority in communities, and orchestrating mass violence and protest. Drawing on a formal model, fieldwork, and case studies from the US and Latin America, I show how gangs use control over prison life, plus the state-provided threat of incarceration, to project power. The model predicts that common state responses—crackdowns and harsher sentencing— can strengthen prison gangs’ leverage over outside actors, consistent with the observed expansion of prison gangs during mass-incarceration initiatives. These gang-strengthening effects of incarceration can have increasing returns, implying a point beyond which additional punishment erodes state authority.