State Violence and the Principal Agent Approach

This paper will focus on state executions during the Irish civil war. It will show how and why state violence of this kind created classic principal agent problems. However, much of the literature developed on this subject focusses on militias and sexual violence where states may have an interest in disowning the actions of agents. This literature also focusses on informational asymmetries and conflicts of interest; neither idea fully explains the nature of the principal agent problems in the Irish civil war. As an alternative the paper will focus on the communicative logic of state executions; since this form of violence combined punishment, deterrence and the symbolic demonstration of the government to act, the nature of the principal agent problem the government faced derived from a different source.