Essays on the Political Economy of Territorial Control During Conflict

Abstract

This dissertation examines how armed groups manage a central tension in the pursuit of territorial control: violence is often necessary to secure control, but it can also destroy the economic activity that makes control valuable. Across civil and criminal wars, I develop theory and evidence showing how armed groups resolve this tradeoff through coercive restraint. Chapter 1 examines how victorious insurgents build states after civil war. I argue that forced displacement is a key strategy for rebels seeking to consolidate power in areas previously controlled by dissidents. Using a novel dataset of weekly district-to-district population flows constructed from cellphone metadata covering more than 7 million users, I provide evidence that after their victory in Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban used forced displacement strategically to remove politically threatening populations from valuable areas while limiting evictions where local labor and production were economically essential. Chapter 2 extends this framework to criminal wars in Mexico, where I argue that institutional arrangements in legal markets can reshape the strategic behavior of criminal organizations that extract from them. Empirically, I examine how regulatory institutions that certified municipalities in Michoacán, Mexico to export avocados to the United States reshaped cartel behavior. I provide causally identified evidence that export certification incentivized cartel entry, and led to an increase in cartel-related criminal activity but it also tied rents to long-term investment, stability, and regulatory compliance, which led to a reduction of lethal violence often associated with inter-cartel competition. Positive price shocks affected violence before certification but not after, suggesting that once territorial rents depend on long-term production and institutional compliance, cartels suppress violence to preserve order. Chapter 3, co-authored with Christopher W. Blair, Igor Kolesnikov, and Austin L. Wright, steps back from these two empirical cases to situate the dissertation within the broader scholarly literature on territorial control. We trace how the concept of territorial control has evolved across three generations of conflict research and identify key conceptual and measurement challenges for future work.