 Hello everyone, and thank you for inviting me here to give a presentation today which I've co-authored with Adeen Malik from Oxford and Pradzah Rahman from Kadawzum University in Pakistan. I'll be presenting on hybrid governance and conflict in Pakistan's North-West Frontier. So what is the motivation for our work? There are essentially two strains of scholarly consensus within the field, at least when we talk about economic drivers of conflict, and that first of all, let me just say that conflict does matter for development. According to the World Bank, almost 80% of global humanitarian needs arise due to conflict. Scientific affected countries also witness substantial growth retardation ranging from anywhere between 2 to 8.4% of loss in annual GDP growth. But there is a literature which basically links conflict with weak institutions or limited state capacity, and hopefully a lot of us are familiar with lots of path-breaking work in there, and I've listed lots of papers over here for the sake of reference. In particular, weak state capacity has been described as a particularly important correlate of conflict and violence in this literature. So there's a new book which also talks about institutions. But the role of institutions still, we feel, needs to be unpacked a bit. This is because despite the salience of weak institutions as a determinant of conflict, our knowledge of the role of specific political and legal institutions is limited. As Blatman and Miguel argue, several of the institutional characteristics have yet to be carefully defined and measured. So in essence, if you look at prior empirical work, mostly mainly has focused on cross country differences in the quality of institutions which are typically inherited from the past, i.e. shaped from colonialism. However, there is, you know, colonialism cannot be considered as a singular treatment as colonizers tended to build diverse institutions even within the same colonial territory. Such institutional heterogeneity is most visible between what we're called frontier and non-frontier regions. The frontier regions of the empires, this is British empire I'm primarily talking about, presented a common set of challenges for the imperial administration. To deal with these challenges, colonizers devised more exceptional legal and administrative arrangements in the frontier territories that created a complex overlay of informal and formal institutions resulting in what is called hybrid forms of governance. So what were the motivations behind colonizers, you know, kind of setting up these hybrid forms of governance? Well, primarily, you know, the political science literature tells us that there were three main factors of regarding why colonizers were more likely to establish these exceptional institutional arrangements in the frontier territories. First of all, they face grave external threat, and that's why they needed to kind of think more in terms of what specific, you know, legal and administrative arrangements to put in place in these areas. There was also the potential to extract resources was limited in these areas and the cost of extending state capacity or authority was also relatively high. So those are the three main reasons for setting up these hybrid forms of governance, which is the main explanatory variable in our paper. So what are some examples of these hybrid forms of governments that were implemented in the front-aid areas? So for instance, borderlands, you know, can be considered borderlands of the empires as sites for exceptional imperial rule. So peripheral regions of European and new European empires like Kenya's northern frontier with Somaliland, where the special district administrative ordinance was enacted, Pakistan's north-pastier frontier province, where the frontier crimes regulation was enacted, which is the main focus of this paper, India's northeast, where the Chin Hill regulations of 1896 were enacted by the imperial administration. So these colonial era hybrid institutions have tended to persist in one form and another with some modifications, even in the post-colonial period. This is certainly the case with Pakistan's northwest frontier, which is the main focus of this paper. So what is the link between hybrid rule and conflict? The idea that state authority and capacities are inherited from the past and are varied within colonial territories has important implications for the study of conflict. Local hybridity in these frontier regions meant that there was limited state authority, less recourse to formal institutions of conflict management like elected governments, courts, police, etc. These hybrid areas had none of those more formalized ways of dealing with conflict or conflict management, and there was much greater delegation of power to local tribal elites in these areas. So the distinct mode of governance that emerged in these frontier regions created different state-society relations, producing what we argue are the conditions for sovereignty contesting forms of violence. By contrast, in the non-frontier regions, there were more likely to be formalized channels of intermediation between the subjects and the state, for example, through electoral politics, through the bureaucracy, through courts, and so on and so forth. So in other words, hybrid institutions, hybrid areas, these frontier areas were more prone or more sensitive to the emergence of conflict. I'm going to skip a lot of these slides in the favor of time. So what do we do in this paper? In this paper, we essentially utilize a historical boundary in Pakistan's northwestern frontier that separated areas that were governed by the frontier crimes regulation, which is what we are calling hybrid areas, from non-FCR areas. We use a spatial regression discontinuity design framework to test how historical exposure to hybrid governance structures affects contemporary incidents of conflict against the state in these areas. We find that areas that fall just inside the FCR border experience greater conflict than areas that lie outside, just outside the border, and our results hold up to a whole battery of robustness checks. To offer a plausible mechanism, we argue that regions that were under the FCR rule are essentially more prone to external shocks. So they're less resilient to external shocks when it comes to the onset and intensity of violence. And a particular shock that we are looking at is the 2001 invasion of, US invasion of Afghanistan. And that happens in a neighboring country. This is an international relation shock. You have this significant difference emerging in conflict intensity between the hybrid and the non-hybrid areas of Pakistan's northwestern region. And it happens largely through the systematic assassination of tribal elites, who were the linchpin of these hybrid governance forms that were set up in these hybrid governance areas. So let me just, this is the RD specification. If any of you want the technical details, I can offer them later on. But let me just quickly move on to showing you this map, which basically maps geocodes all the conflict incidents in our data set from 1970 right up till 2018. As you can see, the shaded area is what I'm calling the hybrid areas. And there's a lot more higher intensity of conflict in those areas versus the non-shaded areas. So this is essentially, and the border is the green line over there. So this is essentially the kind of exposure to hybrid versus non-hybrid. And the variation in the data that we're exploiting. So if one were to look at simple regression analysis and like RD regression analysis and look at the coefficients, you see that being inside the FCR border has significantly increased attacks against state targets. So these are targets like military institutions, police courts, so on and so forth. And this is, you know, including a whole battery of controls and border segment fixed effects and so on and so forth, more of the technical boring detail. But the message is attacks against the state, a lot more attacks against the state when you move from outside the FCR to inside the hybrid governance areas. This is a visual description of the discontinuity. Not only do you see a discontinuity in the estimates, but you also see that the confidence intervals of the discontinuity do not overlap. So it's a highly significant result. We also obviously implement standard control tests whereby we check for balance over a whole series of geographic and climatic characteristics. Why do we do that? Because both geographic and climatic characteristics have been argued as being important correlates of violence. So we want to show that there is balance when, you know, in our RD sample, in our estimation sample when it comes to these important geographic and climatic characteristics like ruggedness, slope, topography, precipitation and temperature. So the RD specification hopefully is valid. That's what we're trying to argue there. These are, you know, again, validity tests whereby we don't find any significantly different discontinuities in any of these geographic or climatic variables. We perform a bunch of robustness tests. I can go into later on if you would like more information on that. But finally, I'll end my presentation by talking a bit about the mechanism. So I've just shown you that hybrid areas have higher intensity of conflict, more particularly sovereignty, contesting conflict versus non-hybrid areas. An important reason for this, why this is the case, is that there is an absence of formal institutions of conflict management. This created essentially greater dependence on elite intermediation when it came to maintaining order. And as the US invasion, 2001 US invasion of Vanesan happened, this elite, this very important cog in the wheel of this hybrid governance system, which were the tribal mullocks or the elites who were maintaining this system, were systematically assassinated and eliminated as a consequence of the 2001 invasion, primarily because of the role that the clandestine state played in the proxy wars that were going on over there. And there's a whole of literature on how that happened. And we also show some results where we show a discontinuous rise in assassination against the informal tribal elites right around the time of the US invasion, which then essentially creates a total collapse of the social and political order in the hybrid governance areas, and consequently the violence ensued from there. So the main message finally is that in hybrid governance systems, they're more resilient to external shocks because there are certain key actors over which the whole system relies. And there is a complete absence of more formalized institutions of conflict management. And once you take out those key actors from these hybrid governance areas, as we show happened because of the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the whole system collapses and you get a rise in localized violence against the state. I think that would pretty much be the extent of what I have to say. Thank you. Thank you.