Heidi Kaila is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Cornell University, and a Co-Editor of EconThatMatters. Jeffrey Bloem is a Ph.D. candidate in Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota.
The recent CSAE conference, an annual conference on the economic development in Africa organized at Oxford included great new conflict research, which examines both the causes and the consequences of conflict. In addition to political violence and war, the presented papers also examined household exposure to violence both in terms of victimization of the household as well as intimate partner violence (IPV). A smaller subset of papers also looked at government programs and conflict. Finally, we noticed that the ACLED database is widely used when studying political conflict in Africa.
Causes of conflict -interference from abroad and lack of economic opportunity
Many of the papers on the causes of conflict focus on understanding what fuels conflict around the world so that efforts to limit the prevalence of conflict can be more effective.
Jeffrey Bloem investigates the impact of the Dodd-Frank Act in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and surrounding countries. He finds that although the legislation aims to reduce conflict fueled through the international trade of “conflict minerals,” the policy may have backfired within the DRC and failed to reduce conflict across all covered countries. This effect may be driven by a shock to the mineral labor market due to a sharp decrease in the international trade of specific minerals mined in the DRC. Focusing more specifically on different types of mineral mines and conflict in the DRC, Majike Verpoorten finds that the relationship between mineral mines and conflict is much stronger for artisanal mines than for industrial mines. This may be because industrial mining companies can pay for their own security. These findings suggest a need to refine existing theories about the relationship between minerals and conflict with more locally validated nuance.
Using leaked personnel data from Daesh (also known as ISIS/ISIL) recruits Clement Joubert examines the factors that lead to terrorist recruitment. Particularly for countries close to Syria, the lack of economic opportunities—measured as the unemployment rate disaggregated by country and education level—explains enrollment in terrorist organizations. More generally, Olivier Sterck re-visits previous research suggesting that more closely related populations are more prone to engage in conflict with each other. Re-analyzing this previous analysis suggests that that relationship may be spurious and an artifact of omitted variable bias. Importantly, it seems that the presence of a few “imperialist” countries largely explain the previously observed relationship.
Consequences of conflict -political is personal
The papers looking at consequences of conflict were mostly focused on households in conflict. In the case of Nigeria, Neha Hui finds that domestic violence increased in areas that experience higher levels of political violence, such as Boko Haram attacks. Also in Nigeria, Heidi Kaila finds that household victimization, particularly property crimes and crimes perpetrated by insurgents, led to lower consumption and higher food insecurity. Events perpetrated by organized groups, particularly insurgents, were more detrimental than those by other actors.
Hannah Sam, studying household welfare, finds that households located in areas which experienced a higher intensity of the Sierra Leone civil war had lower per capita expenditure levels immediately after the civil war, although these differences disappear over the following years. Children in the households affected by conflict can be the most vulnerable because events in early life might have long term impacts. Using data from Chad, Soazic Elise Wang Sonne finds that the exposure to local conflict in a child’s first 5 years of life leads to stunting, wasting, and being underweight, which is found to operate through reduced access to health care.
While most of the conflict presentations focused on households and individuals, Michel Armel Ndayikeza provided a macro perspective. Ndayikeza estimates the economic costs of the civil war in Burundi and finds that the conflict reduced economic growth by an average of 4 percentage points per year Between 1993 and 2003, the civil war cost each Burundian between $1,200 and $1,600 and between $8 to $10 billion for the entire country.
Finally, the consequences of conflict are also psychological. Using a lab-in-the-field experiment in Northern Uganda, Benedict Makanga finds that on average armed conflict did not influence trust among the participants, but among participants that had been abductees at a young age trust was lower.
Government programs and violence
Using data from a large employment RCT in post-conflict Cote d’Ivoire, Assi José Carlos Kimou finds that in the long term the program increased the likelihood to attend community meetings and trust in family members and colleagues.
Two studies showed that an unconditional cash transfer can reduce intimate partner violence. Using evidence from Ghana, Elsa Valli finds stronger effects among monogamous than polygamous households. Johannes Haushofer conducted an RCT in Kenya finding that the transfer reduced physical violence regardless of whether the transfer was given to women or to men. However, sexual violence only reduced when the cash transfer was given to the woman.
The challenges in measuring conflict
The measurement of conflict and violence is challenging for multiple reasons. Measuring the experience of violence and in particular intimate partner violence, is hard as culture and trust to enumerators might influence what gets reported. Claire Cullen showed evidence of underreporting intimate partner violence in the contexts of Nigeria and Rwanda. Due to measurement issues, the available high-quality datasets are used extensively. A common source of data on political conflict in at least five papers at the CSAE is the ACLED database. ACLED collects information on newspaper reports on events related to political conflict and fatalities and provides geocoordinates of the events.
Information on the perpetrators is almost non-existent. While information on the perpetrator can be collected from the victims (such as in Kaila using telephone survey data on Nigeria), information provided by perpetrators themselves is almost impossible to collect: The data on the DAESH foreign fighters used by Joubert are believed to have been leaked by a defector. Information on the perpetrators can be used to study the motivation behind violence and conflict and can eventually lead to policy recommendations for preventive policies.
