While a new, growing subset of the literature argues that armed conflict does not necessarily erode social cohesion in the postwar era, we challenge this perspective and examine how civil war experiences shape social trust in Kosovo after the war from 1998 to 1999. Based on a nationwide survey conducted in 2010 and the disaggregated conflict event data set of the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, we simultaneously analyze the impact of individual war-related experiences and exposure to war in the community through hierarchical analyses of twenty-six municipalities. Our findings confirm that civil war is negatively related to social trust. This effect proves to be more conclusive for individual war experiences than for contextual war exposure. Arguably, the occurrence of instances of violence with lasting psychological as well as social structural consequences provides people with clear evidence of the untrustworthiness, uncooperativeness, and hostility of others, diminishing social trust in the aftermath of war.

Sexual violence is believed to be widespread during war. Yet empirical evidence concerning its prevalence is often limited. Victims, out of feelings of shame or fear, underreport this form of violence. We tackle this problem by administering a list experiment in a representative survey in Sri Lanka, which is only recently recovering from an ethnic civil war between Sinhalese and Tamils. This unobtrusive method reveals that around 13 percent of the Sri Lankan population has personally experienced sexual assault during the war—a prevalence ten times higher than elicited by direct questioning. We also identify vulnerable groups: Tamils who have collaborated with rebel groups and the male-displaced population suspected of collaboration with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Our experimental evidence thus lends support to reports on the asymmetric use of sexual violence by government forces, qualifies conventional wisdom on sexual violence during war, and has important implications for policy.

This article contributes to the debate evolving around the political legacy of armed conflict. We evaluate the effect of war experiences during the 1998–1999 civil war in Kosovo on various modes of political participation. We find that war victims are on average more likely to participate in non-institutionalized forms of participation such as signing petitions and to participate in protests in the postwar era. In addition, we show that the impact of war experiences on political protest is contingent upon the postwar situation. War experiences are linked to protest behavior when a survivor is economically disadvantaged after the war. However, war experiences lose their impact on protest behavior when people do not encounter economic grievances in the postwar environment. In this vein, exploring the postwar context enriches our understanding of the political legacy of war victimization.

No abstract

No abstract