Contemporary studies of genocide have found military capabilities to be inconsistent predictors of state-sponsored killings. We suggest that these empirical inconsistencies stem from the fact that government strength can serve two opposing purposes. Some level of armed capabilities is necessary for a state to remain viable and to provide internal and external security. Yet armed government personnel can be deployed to repress and destroy segments of the public. We identify conditions under which an executive is more likely to use security forces for private-interest killing rather than public protection. We hypothesize that unconstrained leaders are more likely to use their putative security forces to initiate genocide and remain in power. An analysis of state failures that lead to genocide robustly supports the idea that the effect of increased security forces on the risk of genocide is conditional on institutional executive constraints.
Ai, C., and E. Norton.2003. Interaction terms in logit and probit models. Economic Letters80 (1): 123-9.
2.
Aydin, Aysegul, and Scott Gates.2007. Rulers as mass murderers: Political institutions and human insecurity. Paper presented at the annual convention of the International Studies Association, Chicago, February 28 to March 3.
3.
Bates, Robert H., David L. Epstein, Jack A. Goldstone, Tedd Robert Gurr, Barbara Harff, Colin H. Kahl, Kristen Knight, Marc A. Levy, Michael Lustik, Monty G. Marshall, Thomas M. Parris, Jay Ulfelder, and Mark R. Woodward .2003. Political instability task force report, phase IV findings. Fairfax, Virginia: Political Instability Task Force, George Mason University.
4.
Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce, and Randolph Siverson .1995. War and the survival of political leaders: A comparative study of regime types and political accountability . American Political Science Review89 (4): 841-55.
5.
Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce, AlastairSmith, Randolph Siverson, and James Morrow.2003. The Logic of Political Survival. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
6.
Carr, William.1983. A note on the jackknife, the bootstrap and the delta method estimates of bias and variance. Biometrika70 (3): 719-22.
7.
Efron, Bradley.1981. Nonparametric estimates of standard errors: The jackknife, the bootstrap and other methods. Biometrika68 (3): 589-99.
8.
Fearon, James D.1998. The international spread of ethnic conflict. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
9.
Fearon, James, and David Laitin.2003. Ethnicity, insurgency, and civil war . American Political Science Review97 (1): 75-90.
10.
Firth, David.1993. Bias reduction of maximum likelihood estimates. Biometrika80 (1): 27-38.
11.
Gleditsch, Kristian Skrede.2002. Expanded trade and GDP data. Journal of Conflict Resolution46 (5): 712-24.
12.
Goldstone, Jack A., Robert H. Bates, Ted R. Gurr, Michael Lustik, Monty G. Marshall, Jay Ulfelder, and Mark Woodward.2005. A global forecasting model of political instability. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, September 1-4.
13.
Harff, Barbara.2003. No lessons learned from the Holocaust? Assessing risks of genocide and political mass murder since 1955. American Political Science Review97 (1): 57-73.
14.
Heckman, James.1976. The common structure of statistical models of truncation, sample selection and limited dependent variables, and a simple estimator for such models. Annals of Economic and Social Measurement5 (3): 475-92.
15.
Heinze, G. M. Schemper.2002. A solution to the problem of separation in logistic regression . Statistics in Medicine21 (4): 2409-19.
16.
Herbst, Jeffrey.2004. African militaries rebellion: The political economy of threat and combat effectiveness. Journal of Peace Research41 (3): 357-69.
17.
Horowitz, Donald.1985. Ethnic groups in conflict. Los Angeles : University of California Press.
18.
International Criminal Court.2007. Case concerning the application of the Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro . Docket file no. 91. http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/91/13685.pdf (accessed on November 8, 2007).
19.
Jervis, Robert.1976. Perception and misperception in international politics . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
20.
Katzman, Kenneth, and Alfred Prados.2005. The Kurds in post-Saddam Iraq. CRS Report for Congress220 (79): 1-7.
21.
Keefer, Philip.2007. Insurgency and credible commitments in autocracies and democracies. World Bank Policy Research working paper 4185, April 1. World Bank, Development Research Group, Washington, DC. http://www.-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/IW3P/IB/2007/03/29/000016406_20070329112306/Rendered/PDF/wps4185.pdf (accessed on November 10, 2007).
22.
King, Gary, and Langche Zeng.2001. Logistic Regression in Rare Events Data. PoliticalAnalysis9 (2): 137-63.
23.
———. 2006. The dangers of extreme counterfactuals. Political Analysis14 (2): 131-59.
24.
Krain, Matthew.1997. State-sponsored mass murder: The onset and severity of genocides and politicides. Journal of Conflict Resolution41 (3): 331-60.
25.
Lai, Brian, and Daniel Slater.2006. Institutions of the offensive: Domestic sources of dispute initiation in authoritarian regimes, 1950-1992. American Journal of Political Science50 (1): 113-26.
26.
Laitin, David D., and Said S. Samatar .1987. Somalia: Nation in search of a state. Boulder, CO: Westview .
27.
Lake, David A., and Matthew A. Baum .2001. The invisible hand of democracy: Political control and the provision of public services. Comparative Political Studies34 (6): 587-621.
28.
Lake, David A., and Donald Rothchild .1998a. The international spread of ethnic conflict. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
29.
———. 1998b. Spreading fear: The genesis of transnational ethnic conflict . In The international spread of ethnic conflict, edited by D. A. Lake and D. Rothchild, 1-35. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
30.
Lewis, I.M.2002. Modern history of the Somali. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
31.
Marshall, Monty G., and Keith Jaggers.2002. Polity IV project: Political regime characteristics and transitions, 1800-2002. User's manual. College Park: University of Maryland.
32.
McGinnis, Michael D., and John T. Williams .2001. Compound dilemmas: Democracy, collective action, and superpower rivalry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
33.
Midlarsky, Manus.2005. The killing trap: Genocide in the twentieth century. New York: Cambridge University Press.
34.
Military balance. 1963-2004. London: International Institute of Strategic Studies.
35.
Poe, Steven C., Neil Tate, and Linda Camp Keith .1999. Repression of the human rights to personal integrity revisited: A global cross-national study covering the years 1976-1993. International Studies Quarterly43 (1): 291-313.
36.
Reynal-Querol, M., and Jose G. Montalvo .2005. Ethnic polarization, potential conflict and civil wars. American Economic Review95 (3): 796-816.
37.
Reynolds, Andrew, and Bernard Grofman .1994. Choosing an electoral system for the new South Africa: The main proposals. Conference on Electoral Reform and Democratization, Institute for Western European Studies, Columbia University, New York, April 18-19.
38.
Rummel, Rudolph J.1994. Death by government. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishing.
39.
———. 1995. Democracy, power, genocide and mass murder. Journal of Conflict Resolution39 (1): 3-26.
40.
Sambanis, Nicholas.2001. Do ethnic and non-ethnic civil wars have the same causes? A theoretical and empirical inquiry. Journal of Conflict Resolution45 (3): 259-82.
41.
Scully, Gerald W.1997. Democide and genocide as rent-seeking activities. Public Choice93 (1): 77-97.
42.
Shaw, Martin. 2003. War and Genocide. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
43.
Singer, J. David.1987. Reconstructing the Correlates of War dataset on material capabilities of states, 1816-1985. International Interactions14:115-32.
44.
Stanton, Gregory H.2007. The eight stages of genocide. Genocide watch report. http://www.genocide-watch.org/eightstages.htm (accessed on May 5, 2007).
45.
Tarrow, Sidney.1994. Power in movement: Social movements, collective action and politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press .
46.
Valentino, Benjamin A.2004. Final solutions: Mass killing and genocide in the twentieth century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
47.
Vestal, Theodore M.1999. Ethiopia: A post—cold war African State. London: Praeger.
48.
Weingast, Barry.1997. The political foundations of democracy and the rule of law. American Political Science Review91 (2): 245-63.
49.
World Bank.2007. World development indicators. Washington, DC: World Bank.
50.
Xu, Jun J., and Scott Long.2005. Confidence intervals for predicted outcomes in regression models for categorical outcomes. Stata Journal5 (4): 537-59.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
