Civil War, Institutional Change, and the Criminalization of the State: Evidence from Guatemala
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Civil War, Institutional Change, and the Criminalization of the State: Evidence from Guatemala Rachel A. Schwartz 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The relationship between war and state formation is a central topic in the social sciences. While scholarship on interstate war posits that conflict triggers extractive processes that build the state, research findings on the effects of intrastate war are more mixed, often suggesting that civil war inhibits extraction and induces state decay. This study, however, posits that the negative relationship between civil war and revenue extraction is not underpinned by institutional destruction but by the wartime introduction of undermining rules that structure behavior in ways that subvert taxation. To illustrate this claim, it traces the evolution of undermining rules within the customs administration at the height of the Guatemalan armed conflict. As the perceived escalation of the insurgent threat created institutional ambiguity, newly empowered political-military elites implemented alternative procedures for capturing customs revenues, which systematically undermined the state’s extractive capacity. Comparing this case with one of reinforcing rules that bolster extraction, I posit that the broad or narrow nature of the rule-making coalition explains divergent paths of wartime institutional development. Overall, this study uncovers the inner workings of the counterinsurgent state and illustrates how civil war dynamics induce processes of institutional change that can have long-term effects on state performance. Keywords Civil war . Institutions . State-building . Central America
Introduction Countries emerging from civil war face numerous social, political, and economic challenges, producing a tenuous peace and stunted recovery process. Scholars and * Rachel A. Schwartz [email protected]
1
Department of History and Political Science, Otterbein University, 1 South Grove Street, Westerville, OH 43081, USA
Studies in Comparative International Development
policymakers link these adverse outcomes to a common feature of postwar settings: state weakness (Sisk 2013; Lake 2016). Of particular concern is the inability of postwar states to extract tax revenue to restore infrastructure, enhance public security, and provide war-torn communities with healthcare, education, and economic services to rebuild their lives and livelihoods. Though classic studies found that war “made the state” by facilitating taxation (Tilly 1975), intrastate conflict is instead associated with more mixed findings. Cross-national analyses have identified a robust negative correlation between civil war and tax capacity (Besley and Persson 2008; Thies 2010); however, other studies note that internal conflict can also bolster state extraction (Slater 2010; Flores-Macías 2014, 2018; Rodríguez-Franco 2016). Yet the mechanisms that account for these divergent patterns, particularly the stateweakening effect of civil war, have received far less attention. St
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