Aid, minds and hearts: The impact of aid in conflict zones

Abstract

It is widely assumed that development aid can help to stabilize regions in or after conflict. However, we lack empirical evidence for this assumption, and the assumed causal mechanisms are poorly specified. We conduct a micro-level longitudinal study of eighty communities in North East Afghanistan between 2007 and 2009 and investigate the impact of aid on (perceived) security. We also investigate two possible causal mechanisms, which may link aid to security: whether aid has an impact on attitudes towards international civilian and military actors ('hearts and minds') and whether aid can help to increase the legitimacy of the state ('state reach'). While we find that aid does neither increase perceived security nor foster more positive attitudes towards international actors, we find that aid as a positive impact on state legitimacy.

Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, and Domestic Government Legitimacy: Experimental Evidence from Bangladesh

“…Using data from the Afrobarometer surveys, Sacks (2012) finds a positive correlation between non-state service provision and tax morale (i.e., citizens' willingness to recognize the state's legitimate right to collect taxes). This is also the finding of Zürcher, Köhler, and Böhnke (2010) in northeastern Afghanistan: in places with higher levels of foreign-funded small infrastructure projects, levels of support for the district and provincial government were higher, although this effect did not persist across the four years of the study (see also Böhnke and Zürcher 2013). Guiteras and Mobarak (2014) show in a field experiment that subsidies for small-scale infrastructure in rural Bangladesh initially increases citizen support for the local government until people are given information that the subsidies came from an NGO and that the local government played no role in obtaining them.…”

Doing Harm by Doing Good? The Negative Externalities of Humanitarian Aid Provision during Civil Conflict

“…However, other recent quantitative studies suggest that humanitarian assistance may produce unintended consequences, including worsening or prolonging civil wars or contributing to the diffusion of conflict (e.g., Nunn and Qian 2014; Narang 2014). At the more micro-level, a recent survey experiment conducted in Afghanistan found little support for many of the key mechanisms that undergird the anticipated success of humanitarian and development aid projects in unstable areas (Böhnke and Zürcher 2013). Finally, a related strain of literature demonstrates a robust link between concentrations of displaced persons and the spread of conflict, terrorism, and instability (Choi and Salehyan 2013;Lischer 2005;Milton, Spencer and Findley 2013;Salehyan and Gleditsch 2006).…”

Constellations of Fragility: an Empirical Typology of States

“…At the moment, we rely on the assumption that in many situations, provisions made by other actors are at least partly credited to the state. A field study from Afghanistan confirms this assumption for the dimension of legitimacy (Böhnke and Aid 2013). However, better distinguishing a state's endogenous capacity from that of competing or complementary actors would improve the validity of country classifications.…”