Chelsea Estancona, Ph.D.
estancon@mailbox.sc.edu
Assistant Professor
University of South Carolina
Year of PhD: 2018
Country: United States (South Carolina)
Research Interests
Conflict Processes & War
Political Violence
Political Economy
Rebel Group Financing
Civil War Economics
Paramilitary Organizations
Criminal Organizations
Illicit Economies
Countries of Interest
Colombia
Mexico
My Research:
My research agenda unites the substantive areas of political violence and political economy. I research natural resources in intrastate conflict, commodity price shocks, rebel and criminal governance, and local strategic interaction in civil war. I also have projects about militias, illicit finance and offshore financial centers, and threat perception and repression.
Publications:
Journal Articles:
Why do governments choose to fund pro-government militias (PGMs) if doing so could extend costly civil conflict? While PGMs are active in a majority of civil wars, their impact on conflict termination remains poorly understood. We argue that the choice to fund PGMs is a strategic one for states and part of their efforts to influence wartime dynamics and conflict termination. We hypothesize that PGMs’ impact on conflict termination is conditional on whether they are government funded. Government-funded PGMs help states to ward off costly negotiations and encourage the rebellion's gradual dissolution. Using competing risks analyses on civil wars ending between 1981 and 2007, we find robust evidence that PGM funding affects conflict outcomes.
Stationary banditry is ubiquitous in civil war, with some rebel groups even investing in and profiting from primary commodities for years or decades. But for many of these groups, labor is a necessary component of resource production, such that laborers’ economic participation is vital for rebel funding and survival. States, meanwhile, are eager to prevent rebels from establishing these economic footholds. In areas where rebels can assert control of primary commodity markets, military competition between states and rebels may be supplemented by economic competition over laborers’ efforts. Under what conditions do governments wage local economic war by providing incentives to laborers to minimize the appeal of economically partnering with rebels? I argue that laborers’ economic loyalty is a central and under-considered component to resource-driven conflicts. When rebels seek to establish stationary banditry, states incentivize laborers to participate in the legal economy rather than rebel-controlled markets. Specifically, states will pursue economic counterinsurgency policies in areas where rebels are most likely to profit from labor-intensive primary commodities. I find support for this argument using municipal-level Colombian data about the FARC’s involvement in the coca trade and government provision of agricultural credits.
Rebel organizations often benefit from the sale of primary commodities. However, producing these commodities may require labor from noncombatants. Rebels provide security and payment to civilian suppliers, but their ability to do so depends on consistent profits. How, then, do price shocks to labor-intensive primary commodities undermine rebel–supplier relationships? I hypothesize that negative commodity price shocks lead cash-strapped rebels to ensure suppliers’ loyalty by substituting coercion for positive incentives. Conversely, states seek to limit rapid increases in rebels’ profit while avoiding the reputational costs of civilian victimization. Thus, victimization of rebel suppliers from groups such as pro-government paramilitaries is hypothesized to increase after positive commodity price shocks. I test these hypotheses with a new dataset covering 1999–2007 that combines monthly US STRIDE (System to Retrieve Information from Drug Evidence) data on cocaine price with municipal-level data from the Colombian Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica about the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) and paramilitary groups’ use of civilian victimization.
To mitigate the costs associated with suppressing rebellion, states may rely on civilian self-defense militias to protect their territory from rebel groups. However, this decision is also costly, given that these self-defense groups may undermine control of its territory. This raises the question: why do governments cultivate self-defense militias when doing so risks that these militias will undermine their territorial control? Using a game theoretic model, we argue that states take this risk in order to prevent rebels from co-opting local populations, which in turn may shift power away from the government and toward the rebels. Governments strategically use civilian militias to raise the price rebels must pay for civilian cooperation, prevent rebels from harnessing a territory's resources, and/or to deter rebels from challenging government control in key areas. Empirically, the model suggests states are likely to support the formation of self-defense militias in territory that may moderately improve the power of rebel groups, but not in areas that are either less valuable or areas that are critical to the government's survival. These hypotheses are tested using data from the Colombian civil war from 1996 to 2008.
Media Appearances:
TV Appearances:
Interviewed about Israel/Hamas conflict.
Radio Appearances:
Interviewed about the conflict and humanitarian crisis in Sudan.