The politics of security policy : evidence from language violence in India, 1950-1989
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The study of why governments fail to prevent civil violence generally does not consider how domestic political actors impact internal security policy. I argue that governments may avoid measures that would prevent militancy in order to curry favor with the constituencies who have the most to lose from such policies. In this context, the aim of militancy is to convince other interests that share in the costs of violence and repression to put pressure on the government for policy concessions. Civil violence targets the interests of groups that have sufficient political importance to block accommodations during peacetime but are vulnerable to a backlash from other constituencies if the costs of violence escalate. I investigate this model of domestic politics and internal security policy by examining the incidence of language violence in India. Every territorially-concentrated language group in India, in theory, could demand its own state within the country's linguistic federation. Among the scores of Indian languages there are groups that have gained a state peacefully, languages that have achieved statehood only in the wake of violence, and languages that have never mobilized around statehood demands. As suggested above, a critical factor in these differences in militancy and accommodation is the political power of the dominant interests in the existing Indian states. This dissertation demonstrates these patterns using evidence from fieldwork in Northeast India; large-n analysis of the incidence of language violence, including separatist civil wars; and an analysis of Indian parliamentary debates.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Copyright date | 2011 |
| Publication date | 2010, c2011; 2010 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Lacina, Bethany Ann |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Political Science |
| Primary advisor | Laitin, David D |
| Thesis advisor | Laitin, David D |
| Thesis advisor | Fearon, James D |
| Thesis advisor | Jha, Saumitra |
| Thesis advisor | Wilkinson, Steven, 1965- |
| Thesis advisor | Weinstein, Jeremy M |
| Advisor | Fearon, James D |
| Advisor | Jha, Saumitra |
| Advisor | Wilkinson, Steven, 1965- |
| Advisor | Weinstein, Jeremy M |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Bethany Ann Lacina. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Political Science. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2011. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2011 by Bethany Ann Lacina
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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