Benevolent Buffering under Persistent Repression: A Finite-Horizon Theory of Unintended Stabilization

Benevolent relief can improve an individual’s immediate welfare while also affecting the persistence of the structure producing that individual’s grievance. This paper isolates grievance buffering: relief that lowers accumulated grievance without removing its structural source. Individuals differ in grievance generation, retention, buffer sensitivity, action thresholds, and effective action horizons. In a discrete-time model with nonnegative grievance, stronger buffering produces a pathwise reduction in grievance and weakly contracts the set of individuals who cross an action threshold within finite horizons. Under constant inputs, the model yields a closed-form critical buffering boundary and a population-level stabilization function. The effect is independent of provider intent: state, non-state, and sincerely oppositional actors generate the same modeled threshold effect when they produce the same buffer. Synthetic diagnostics show robustness to heterogeneous and correlated populations, while a sufficiently strong countervailing empowerment channel can reverse the net relationship.