Livelihood Coping Mechanisms, Local Intelligence, and the Pattern of Violence During the Maoist Insurgency in Nepal

While fighting insurgency, both state and non-state groups depend on the local population for valuable resources such as food, intelligence, and security. By using a repertoire of subsistence coping mechanisms available to households in the context of the local political economy as an indicator of grievances and mechanisms of interactions between local households and the state and insurgents, district level data from Nepal on Maoist conflict is used to test hypotheses regarding state and insurgent violence. The analysis confirms that the state was more likely to kill people in a district where the number of households that borrowed to cope with subsistence was high. The Maoists were more likely to kill in a district with a higher number of subsistence sufficient households.