Economic Development as a Catalyst for Political Violence

When we talk about economic development, we usually picture roads, factories, ports, and rising incomes. We rarely picture police firing on protesting farmers, peasants taking up arms in forested districts, or entire communities uprooted from land their families have farmed for generations. Yet political theorists have argued for decades that development and violence are not opposites. They are often two sides of the same process. The push to transform an economy almost always creates winners and losers, and when the losers fight back, or when the state forces change upon them, the result is political violence. This post explores why the very pursuit of economic progress so frequently turns violent.

Why economic change breeds conflict
The state as both protector and aggressor
Historical transitions from farm to factory
England and the destruction of the peasantry
Different countries, similar violence
The Indian story: development versus displacement
Singur and Nandigram
Who pays the price of industrialisation?
When deprivation turns to insurgency
Mining, displacement, and tribal anger
Modern economic policy and everyday unrest
The search for a less violent path
What this tells us about progress

Why economic change breeds conflict

Economic development is rarely a smooth, painless climb. It involves reorganising who owns land, who controls capital, who works in fields, and who works in factories. Every one of these shifts disturbs existing power relations. The people who benefit want change to happen quickly. The people who lose out resist it. The state, which usually drives or protects the process, often steps in with force. This is the basic engine of development-linked violence.

The economist and political thinker Adam Smith recognised this connection long ago. For Smith, development required liberty, commerce, and security working together, and violence was a central obstacle to growth because people will not invest, save, or work hard when they fear plunder or disorder. But the flip side is equally true: when a state tries to force commerce and accumulation onto an unwilling society, it often resorts to coercion to do so.

The state as both protector and aggressor

The state plays a dual role in this story. On one hand, it provides the security and legal framework that markets need. On the other, it frequently uses its monopoly on force to clear obstacles to development, whether those obstacles are rebellious peasants, occupied land, or workers demanding better conditions. When the state acts on behalf of industrial and capitalist interests, the deprived classes often experience development not as opportunity but as dispossession.

Historical transitions from farm to factory

To understand how deeply violence is woven into development, look at how agrarian societies became industrial ones. This transition was almost never peaceful. The most influential study of this question comes from the political sociologist Barrington Moore Jr., whose 1966 book Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy examined how England, France, the United States, Germany, Japan, China, and India moved from farming economies to modern industrial ones.

Moore’s central finding was uncomfortable. He drew particular attention to the violence that preceded the development of modern political institutions. The path to industrial society, whether it ended in democracy, fascism, or communism, was paved with coercion against the rural population.

England and the destruction of the peasantry

England is the classic example. As landlords saw profit in commercial farming and wool production, they began the enclosure of common lands that peasants had relied on for survival. Moore described how the bourgeois impulse changed the attitudes of the landed elite toward commercial farming, leading to the destruction of the peasantry through the enclosure system. Common fields became private property. Peasants who had farmed for generations were pushed off the land, creating the landless workforce that would later fill the factories of the Industrial Revolution. This was not a gentle market adjustment. It was a forced restructuring of rural society, backed by law and, when necessary, by force.

Different countries, similar violence

Moore showed that the same basic process unfolded differently depending on local class structures, but violence was a constant. England, France, and the United States experienced violent revolutions that swept away the old order, while Russia and China saw peasant-based communist revolutions, and Germany and Japan moved toward fascist dictatorships. In the communist cases especially, the state extracted savings from the peasantry by force to fund heavy industry. The Soviet and Chinese collectivisation of agriculture, which forcibly mobilised resources from villages to build factories, caused immense suffering and millions of deaths. The lesson is stark: economic development did not always bring democracy, and the transition itself was steeped in violence.

The Indian story: development versus displacement

India did not fully experience the violent agrarian transformation that Moore described in Europe. Its democracy emerged without dismantling the old agrarian structure, which left land and rural power relations largely intact. But the tension between development and the people displaced by it has shaped Indian politics powerfully, especially after the economic liberalisation of 1991 accelerated industrialisation and the demand for land.

Singur and Nandigram

The most dramatic recent examples come from West Bengal. In 2006, the state government tried to acquire nearly a thousand acres of fertile farmland in Singur for a Tata Motors car factory. In 2007, it moved to acquire land in Nandigram for a special economic zone. Both triggered fierce resistance. As researchers have documented, India’s rapid economic growth has frequently been marred by struggles over land acquisition and displacement, and the Singur protests gathered enough momentum to stall the project and reshape the state’s politics.

In Nandigram, the confrontation turned deadly. Villagers dug up roads and stood guard against police entry, and clashes between security forces and residents left many dead. The episode showed how the forced acquisition of farmland for private industry could ignite open conflict between the state and its own citizens. These were not isolated incidents. Similar protests against state-led land acquisition emerged in Kalinganagar and Jagatsinghpur in Odisha, Raigad in Maharashtra, and other sites across the country.

Who pays the price of industrialisation?

The Singur and Nandigram conflicts revealed a recurring pattern. The land being taken was often fertile, multi-crop agricultural land supporting thousands of families. The new industries were capital-intensive, meaning they created few jobs, and almost none suited to displaced farmers and labourers. Sharecroppers, artisans, and agricultural workers who depended on the land but did not formally own it received little or no compensation. The benefits of development flowed to corporations and the state, while the costs fell on the poorest rural classes. When a community feels that progress is being built on its ruin, resistance becomes almost inevitable.

When deprivation turns to insurgency

Land acquisition protests are one kind of reaction. A deeper and more sustained form of violence emerges when whole communities feel permanently excluded from the gains of development. India’s Naxalite or Maoist insurgency is the clearest example.

The movement began in 1967 in Naxalbari, West Bengal, as a peasant uprising against oppressive landlords. Over the decades it spread across the forested and mineral-rich districts of central and eastern India, a region sometimes called the Red Corridor. Its roots, according to most analysts, lie not in ideology alone but in economic grievance. Naxalite groups have claimed to represent the poorest and most marginalised members of society, notably tribal peoples and Dalits.

Mining, displacement, and tribal anger

The connection to economic development is direct. Liberalisation intensified mining and resource extraction in tribal areas, setting corporate interests against local communities. One political scientist has characterised the movement as an expression of long-standing tribal resistance over land, autonomy, and dignity, intensified by economic liberalisation. Adivasi communities living on resource-rich forest land were displaced for mines and projects, often without proper rehabilitation, and were cut off from the wealth extracted from their own territory. Landlessness, exploitation of tribal communities, unemployment, and displacement due to mining projects have all been identified as drivers of the insurgency. When the state delivers neither development nor justice, armed rebellion can fill the vacuum.

Modern economic policy and everyday unrest

Violence linked to development is not only about land and insurgency. The everyday outcomes of economic policy can also fuel unrest. When policies favour certain classes or sectors over others, the result can be inflation, unemployment, and deepening poverty among those left behind. Rising prices erode the purchasing power of the poor. Joblessness, especially among educated youth, breeds frustration. Widening inequality between a prosperous elite and struggling masses creates a sense of injustice that can spill into protest, riots, and clashes with authority.

Scholars who study political instability note a two-way relationship between economics and violence. Poor economic performance can precipitate social unrest and even military coups, while instability in turn damages growth. Development policy is therefore never purely technical. It is deeply political, and getting the distribution of costs and benefits wrong can be socially explosive.

The search for a less violent path

Recognising these dangers, governments have tried to make development more inclusive. In India, the colonial-era land law of 1894 was finally replaced by the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act of 2013. The new law introduced mandatory consent from affected families for private and public-private projects, social impact assessments, higher compensation, and rehabilitation requirements. Its long-term aim, as stated in the legislation, is to ensure that land acquisition for industrialisation and urbanisation happens with the least disturbance to owners and that affected people become partners in development. Whether such laws succeed in practice is debated, but their existence shows that the link between development and violence is now widely understood as a problem to be managed, not ignored.

What this tells us about progress

The relationship between economic development and political violence is not an accident or a failure of an otherwise smooth process. It is built into the way economies are transformed. Reorganising land, labour, and capital always redistributes power, and the redistribution is rarely accepted quietly. From the enclosure of English commons to the factories of Singur and the forests of the Red Corridor, the pattern repeats: development creates losers, the state often uses force on behalf of the winners, and the deprived respond with resistance. Understanding this helps us see that genuine progress is not just about growth figures. It is about whether the gains and pains of development are shared fairly enough to keep the peace.

What do you think? Is some degree of conflict an unavoidable price of rapid economic development, or can a society industrialise without forcing its poorest to bear the heaviest costs? And when development and the rights of displaced communities collide, where should the balance lie?

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Table of Contents

Why economic change breeds conflict 🔗

The state as both protector and aggressor 🔗

Historical transitions from farm to factory 🔗

England and the destruction of the peasantry 🔗

Different countries, similar violence 🔗

The Indian story: development versus displacement 🔗

Singur and Nandigram 🔗

Who pays the price of industrialisation? 🔗

When deprivation turns to insurgency 🔗

Mining, displacement, and tribal anger 🔗

Modern economic policy and everyday unrest 🔗

The search for a less violent path 🔗

What this tells us about progress 🔗