This work provides an understanding of violence as a political phenomenon whose analysis should be separated from the causes that lead to the context in which it occurs. In this sense, it offers an analysis of the political use of violence in the context of land conflicts as a dependent variable in function of the level of control that political actors enjoy on a section of the territory. It specifies the conditions of the context in which violence takes place, which at the same time determines the set of strategies the actors, i.e. farmers and peasants, can resort to. This work incorporates into the analysis the notion of property rights developed by the school of New Institutional Economics as a tool to determine the level of control that the actors in land conflicts enjoy in a given territory. For this purpose, we use the theoretical model of political economy of violence in civil war developed by Kalyvas (2006). The paper establishes the convergence and divergence between civil war and rural conflicts which enables the application of this theoretical model to the latter context. It is intended to help overcome biases and dominant theories that see violence as a pathological or anomic phenomenon, which inhibits the empirical research and analytical work. According to preliminary results, it seems reasonable to suggest that there is a causal relationship whereby the better-defined property rights are less likely to cause rural conflicts and to resort to coercive violence. However, no conclusive evidence was found on the relationship between de facto property rights and the use of coercive violence. These observations are agnostic, at least in first place, to those of problems of distribution of property rights posited by Ostrom (2000).
