Terrorism, Insurgency, State Repression, and Cycles of Violence

Over the last half century, violent conflicts between ethno-religious organizations and states have shaped the political and economic development context in developing countries. However, global empirical evidence on the dynamic and strategic underpinnings of these phenomena is lacking. Here, we investigate the dynamic violent relationships between the organizations that represent minorities at risk and the governments in Middle-Eastern and North African countries. Our estimates of dynamic panel data models of discrete strategic responses reveal dampened cycles of violence between states and insurgent politico-ethnic organizations due to violent mutual responses. However, such cycles are absent when the organizations target civilians instead, which is more likely after an insurgency spell. Finally, we provide an original game-theoretical interpretative framework for our results, which allows us to identify, on average and under sensible restrictions, the Stag Hunt game as an appropriate representation of the (possibly reduced-form) general strategic situations that link states and minority organizations in MENA.This is at odds with the frequent use of the prisoner's dilemma setting in the literature, or of other ad hoc strategic hypotheses, to analyze conflicts.