Impact of security expenditures in military alliances on violence from non-state actors: evidence from India

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the impact of security expenditures from military alliances involving third-party intervention on violent incidents from non-state actors. Our main learning is a rather surprising factthat at a lower level of security expenditure in the violence affected area, an increase in security expendi-tures leads to an increase in violent incidents (rather than a decrease); and only at higher level of securityexpenditure in the area, an increase in security expenditure leads to a decline in violent incidents. For theanalysis, we use a novel dataset on naxalite violence obtained directly from the police head-quarters of thethree most affected states in India. The data consists of 64 districts spanning over years 2001 till 2013 andincludes information on the annual number of violent incidents and the size of the security forces allocatedspecifically to curb the naxalite violence. We use negative binomial regression model with the number ofviolent incidents as the dependent variable and lagged size of security forces as the independent variable,while controlling for other relevant variables. Further, to address issues of potential reverse causality, weuse a propensity score matching technique to infer the causal nature of such an association.We also argue that when the union government intervenes as a third party to support the state govern-ments to fight the naxalites, the latter may be under-funding by free riding. However, despite such under-funding, if the overall contribution is positive and continued, eventually the concentration of security forcesin an area will overwhelm the naxalites and reduce the incidents.Lastly, we highlight that though the mainstream literature on civil wars has used per capita income as aproxy for security expenditures, it becomes inappropriate when a more direct measure of security expen-ditures is used.