State failure, genocide and politicide reconsidered

Abstract

State failure is highly threatening to incumbent elites, providing them motive to engage in genocide or politicide. The destruction of formal institutions may also remove political barriers to employing such atrocities. Thus, previous scholars expect state failure to increase the likelihood of genocide and politicide. However, such logic overlooks that these atrocities are government policy, which require planning and implementation. Since government institutions collapse during state failure, regime elites will possess little physical ability to commit widespread and systematic killing of their enemies. Therefore, I expect state failure to be associated with a lower likelihood of genocide and politicide. Using bivariate probit regression to handle the endogeneity between state failure and these atrocities, I find strong support for my argument in all country-years since 1946.