Seminario CEDE - Juan Sebastián Galán

This paper studies Colombian paramilitarism as a natural experiment to understand the logic of the really existing Colombian state. In contrast to stylized dichotomies of different types of states (ie: Weberian “rational-legal” vs. patrimonial), we develop a model where the Weberian core allows for the self-organization of the non-Weberian periphery in spatial equilibrium. Using novel data on the organization of paramilitary groups, preliminary empirical results suggest the comparative statics of this equilibrium can be very perverse - when the core moves into the periphery it provides fewer public goods with more violence and illegality, than when the periphery self-organizes outside the scope of the state.