Threat Perception and Weak State Response to Political Challengers

This abstract is of my work-in-progress doctoral dissertation. State responses to potential political challengers are dynamic and vary by type and over time. What types of responses do states employ against political challengers? Why do state security responses to challengers vary temporally? What causes the variation of state responses to political challengers? Scholarship on state or regime response to potential challengers lacks explanatory power for temporal variation as well for why repression takes place. A causal mechanism is lacking for why there are periods of peace and why there are periods of violence between states and political challengers. This disaggregates the commonly held perspectives on state response that are either violent or nonviolent – showing a spectrum of state responses. This study explores the variation in weak state response to non-core group political challengers, contending that weak states engender internal wars because these states are divided into ethnic factions. I argue that threat perception of political challengers determines a state’s strategy, guiding whether, and how much, it coerces and conducts political violence against challengers. What does threat perception include? Taking a page from Stephen Walt’s state balance of threat theory, this argument suggests that state’s views of internal political challengers as threats are determined by ideology, strength, geographic proximity, offensive capabilities, and its offensive intentions. I am currently working on operationalizing these key facets of threat perception, which is the independent variable to test against the dependent variable of state response. This research will use one unit of analysis, center-minority dyads, consisting of longitudinal analysis, periodizing case studies by splitting the periods of violence and peace up over time and using process tracing to explain the levels of violence and the different center strategies toward political challengers. Specifically, I will study several cases of the Baloch conflict with Pakistan. Measuring the state’s level of violence to the Baloch minority will use databases, such as the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, and information from NGOs and press reports. I am exploring other case studies within South Asia, such as Bangladesh, Kashmir, and others. Also, I am looking at cases outside of the South Asia like the Kurds and the Tuaregs to see if this developing theory on threat perception and state response can be more generalizable to other regions.