The debate on urban theories

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, socio-economic exclusions, deeply encrusted in cities of both the Global North and the South, not only contradict earlier understandings of the urban as homogeneous and uniform, but also pose serious challenges to the modernisation theory – entrapped understanding of the urban as a process and promise of development which will engulf all. Emerging debates are linked by two fundamental dilemmas: First, how does the specificity of the regional/local and the diverse trajectories thereof call for a distinct theory of the city in the Global South? Second, what could be an appropriate conceptual framework for imagining urban marginalities?

The argument for specificity, in post-colonial theorisations of cities of the Global South, rests largely on the deep and stubborn pockets of poverty and social marginalisation in which many disadvantaged urban communities continue to live. Moving away from overarching theories of Southern exclusion, drawn from dependency and world-systems theories, recent scholarship on cities in the Global South has understood urban exclusion primarily in terms of space, broadly defined. Scholars have critiqued typical policy frameworks which see slums in Third World cities as only material spaces to be measured and reconstructed. Instead, and drawing closely on David Harvey's (2009 [1973]) conceptual distinction of space as material and relative, they have pointed to the need to see urban marginality, slums in particular, in terms of the context in which they evolved as spaces for living and livelihood (a process which is negotiated and incremental), their porous and fluid character (in contrast to the exclusivity of the residential space of upper-class urban citizens) (Bhan 2019), and their often seemingly contradictory opposition to state-sponsored housing projects. These features – more or less ubiquitous in cities of the Global South – of urban exclusion have led scholars to new ways of thinking about urbanisation, rooted in the Southern context. Theresa Caldeira's (2017) conception of peripheral urbanisation sees the space in which the urban poor live as one marked by a particular kind of temporality and agency, with a set of relations to law and property that are very different from those that characterise the formal domain, which generate a distinct kind of politics and therefore necessarily lead to highly unequal and diverse cities.

A persistent delinking of growth and employment during the high-growth phase of the Indian economy followed by sluggish growth and eventually episodes of absolute decline in employment in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis is the pretext for a quest towards a growth trajectory that facilitates gainful employment. The macro indicators of growth slowdown, decline in the growth of corporate capital formation, persistently low capacity utilisation at 70 per cent and simultaneously declining absorption capacity of agriculture resulting in a shift of employment from agriculture to the non-farm sector to the tune of 20 percentage points in the past three decades raise serious doubts about the possibility of mending the widening gap between the growth of output and employment. The relative stagnation of manufacturing in terms of share in gross domestic product (GDP) for the past few decades have been the cause of concern for policymakers. Given the assumed advantages of manufacturing in terms of relatively faster growth in productivity, higher backward and forward linkages and spillover effects as well as the potential to create gainful employment, this sector had attracted policy attention by successive governments (Kaldor 1966, 1967). However, the production structure within manufacturing is undergoing major changes with rising capital intensity and declining employment elasticities. Additionally, in a liberalised regime, the dichotomy between the domestic and the global market is largely attenuated. Erstwhile local monopolies face a competitive market as price takers, and hence are increasingly inclined to introduce technologies borrowed from the global shelf which are expectedly labour displacing in nature. In such a milieu, the dominant mode of industrialisation, namely export-oriented growth strategies with hardly any choice of technologies left and reliance on inserting domestic production structures into global networks as the shortcut towards industrialisation, is unlikely to proffer necessary solutions.

The problem, however, cannot be resolved by a straightforward solution of promoting labour-intensive industries. It is not only about employing labour but employing them gainfully. Interestingly, industries that are relatively more labour intensive show a low share in manufacturing value-added in India, and also the share of labour in value-added in these industries is much lower compared to other industries (Roy 2016).

Introduction

Employment generation in India has been skewed in favour of services since early 2000 (GOI 2018), reflecting the sectoral gross domestic product (GDP) shares of manufacturing and services at 17 per cent and services at 53 per cent, respectively. But as the employment growth in services tapers off, one needs to re-examine the role of the manufacturing sector in creating jobs. To be specific, labour-intensive industrialisation is a term that needs elaboration to understand the role of specific sectors and their interlinkages to the local and global economies. In a sense, one needs to reimagine labour-intensive industrialisation in the manufacturing sector and the possible strategies for the same.

Historically, industrialisation strategies depend on factor endowments. A country's direction of trade also signifies its nature of industrialisation. If a country exports labour-intensive goods and imports capital-intensive goods, it follows labour-intensive industrialisation. Over time, as the quality of skill and education improves, the character of exports also improves qualitatively with an improvement in living standards. This is the transition that is targeted by emerging economies with abundant labour endowment. The definition of labour intensive, however, can be relative. For example, despite being more capital intensive than traditional industries such as textiles, the automotive industry is relatively labour intensive in comparison to its counterparts in developed countries. Further, only specific processes such as transfer presses, paint shop and welding operations are capital intensive whereas assembly operations and parts manufacturing are outsourced to the upstream section of the value chain consisting of structured suppliers in the automotive ancillary industries. The contribution of the global automotive industry to GDP ranges between 3 and 7 per cent while the employment share ranges between 5 and 15 per cent in the developed and emerging economies, respectively.

The present chapter analyses the employment potential of the Indian automobile industry, which is a technology-intensive industry with extensive backward and forward linkages. The automobile industry is composed of the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and the auto component manufacturers, which come under different National Industrial Classification (NIC) codes.

Competition is commonplace among militant groups. Although political scientists have begun recognizing its importance, they lag behind other fields in the general study of competition. This is critical due to the strategic depth that competition brings. How one group behaves affects another group, and vice versa. Moreover, target governments and international organizations can manipulate the environment in which the groups must then interact. This chapter argues that building models to examine these issues is a useful strategy, but that the literature on political violence has not yet explored the implications. We then set the stage for the results we develop throughout the book.

Target governments can reduce grievances among disaffected populations who might otherwise pledge support to a group. Incorporating this into the workhorse model, we show an unexpected relationship between the total number of groups and total violence observed. When few groups exist, the target state has little incentive to reduce grievances. Due to the lack of competition, the government calculates that paying that price in violence is worth offering fewer concessions. In contrast, when many groups exist, the competition instills great fear in the target state. As a result, it may calculate that entirely abandoning the objectionable policy is the best solution. Without any supporters to recruit, the groups then drop their violence outputs. Thus, violence may decrease in the number of competing groups because violence deters the government. We characterize the circumstances under which the deterrent effect dominates the competition effect and provide broader tips for the empirical literature on outbidding.

One way a target government can try to mitigate outbidding violence is to increase enforcement efforts to intercept contributions and arrest volunteers to militant groups. We expand the workhorse outbidding model to account for this decision. States with greater enforcement capacity indeed benefit, partially from directly stopping contributions and partially from deterring supporters from making contributions in the first place. The decreased prize therefore also tempers outbidding violence. As a result, competition is contingent on enforcement capacity, with the effect of another group growing larger as that capacity declines. Statistical analysis finds broad empirical support for our mechanism: competitive violence is most pronounced when governments incur higher marginal costs of enforcement. These results increase our confidence that competition drives violence more broadly, as competing explanations do not predict this conditional effect.

This chapter reflects on the generalizable lessons that our theoretical and empirical results generate. Two central ideas emerge. First, strategic interaction is a central component of political violence. Failure to account for it risks generating invalid theoretical mechanisms and ineffective policy recommendations. Second, there is no silver bullet for terrorism. Some policies may be more effective on average than others. But even some seemingly sensible solutions can backfire under the wrong circumstances. As such, policymakers wishing to influence political violence outcomes must have a strong understanding of the causal process that guides the violence before making interventions. We also unite various subthemes that have reoccurred throughout the book, such as the role international institutions play in affecting terrorism patterns.

This chapter develops the workhorse model we explore throughout the book. We begin by substantively motivating many aspects of competitive violence: the marketplace has limited resources, violence is costly but increases a group’s share of those resources, opposing violence decreases one’s own share, and others. These components lead us to conclude that a "contest" model is ideal to study the implications of competition. Doing so allows us to recover a central implication from existing theories of outbidding: that more groups imply more total violence output. However, our model concludes that outbidding is a collective effect rather than an individual one. Even as total violence increases in group numbers, the per-group rate of violence drops. These central results are robust to a variety of alternative assumptions.

We directly assess the empirical evidence of the propositions derived in the previous chapter. First, we conduct a large-n analysis of terrorist violence in every country between 1970 and 2015. We then examine whether there is a relationship between the number of active militant groups in a state and the aggregate amount of violence. We find evidence to support the basic outbidding hypothesis: more militant groups are significantly associated with more violence at the state level. We subsequently analyze the effect of increasing numbers of groups on per group violence. In accordance with our model expectations, we find that while increasing competition appears to lead to more violence overall, per group violence declines on average. Finally, to more fully explore the causal mechanisms at work in this process, we examine in detail the multi-dimensional insurgency in Northeast India since 2009. We find that as aggregate violence in the country and the region increased, groups curtailed their own use of violence due to concerns over diminishing returns and increased costs.

This chapter endogenizes a would-be militant group’s decision to enter the marketplace for violence. We show that an existing group may overproduce violence to corner the market and make its potential rivals calculate that recuperating their costs will be impossible. As a result, violence may be greater when we observe one group than when we observe many. We then investigate four ways in which a target government might mitigate the violence: offensive measures that undermine the lead group’s marginal cost of violence, defensive measures that absorb a portion of all violence, deterrent measures that increase the cost of group formation, and concessions to the group’s audience to reduce grievances. Of these, only specific types of defensive measures are guaranteed to decrease violence. In contrast, increasing the burden of entry and decreasing grievances can counterintuitively increase violence.