On government-industry nexus and indigenous armed resistance

Abstract

This paper proposes a simple game-theoretic framework for analyzing the relationship between the government, industry and indigenous community, especially in the context of mounting violence surrounding displacement of indigenous communities by governments for the purposes of commercial use of their habitat. It specifically takes into account the possibility of alleged `nexus' between the government and the industry and explores its implications on the levels of conflict and utilities of the players. We find that under plausible asymptotic conditions, the counter-resistance measures of the industry in the `no-nexus' regime is higher than that of the government in `nexus' regime. Moreover, both the government and the industry are likely to be better-off in the `nexus' regime while the indigenous community is better-off in the `no-nexus' regime.