10 - Inequality and State Violence: A Short Report

Summary

This chapter presents a brief review of the relationship between various forms of state violence–including war, revolution, civil violence, and coups d'état–and a measure of inequality of manufacturing earnings in countries around the world over the period 1960 to 1995. We find evidence of several systematic relationships, of which the strongest and most striking is that coups precede a long period of rising inequality with a very high probability.

Introduction

This chapter asks whether there exist systematic relationships between levels of state violence and changes in economic inequality in countries around the world. The question is, of course, quite natural. Entire lexicons exist that describe economic relationships in terms that evoke violence; exploitation, dependency, unequal exchange, and class struggle are but prominent examples. And the case histories of war, revolution, repression, and coups d'état are loaded with what seem – transparently – to be efforts either to rectify gross inequalities or to impose them.

Yet from the standpoint of an empiricist interested mainly in the search for patterns in data, substantial obstacles stand in the way of definite observations. First of all, there is the difficulty that reliable measures of short-term change in economic inequality, measures that are both consistent and consistently available, particularly in countries that have been wracked by violence, have not existed. Second, there is the problem of arriving at a consistent categorization of types of violence, so that one may define the predicted effect of each type on economic inequality and vice versa.