As part of the Brown Bag Lunch series, the International Economics Department at the Graduate Institute is pleased to invite you to a public talk given by Siddhant Marur, PhD Candidate in Development Economics and Research Assistant at the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding (CCDP), who will present his paper and work.

ICT in an Insurgency: The Case of Kashmir

by Siddhant Marur

Abstract: 

How do improvements in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) affect political violence - more specifically, political mobilization and armed conflict? I contribute to the nascent empirical evidence on this question by studying the conflict in Kashmir over 2009-2018. I combine an open-source geo-referenced dataset on cellphone towers with event data on armed conflict and protests and utilize a simple Difference-in-Difference framework to show that ICT has an exacerbating impact on political mobilization albeit a negligible effect on armed conflict. Further exploration on underlying mechanisms shows that, contrary to the literature, income does not play a role in mediating either form of political violence. However, state surveillance and network shutdowns lead to a reduction in armed conflict. I then conduct a cellphone tower-level analysis to show that state-owned towers and private towers do not differ in their impact but towers which deepen existing coverage (as opposed to providing new coverage) lead to an increase in political mobilization. This research provides insight on the contemporaneous impact of ICT policies implemented by the state in an attempt to diffuse a long-standing sub-national conflict, one that has received inadequate attention in the conflict economics literature.