Seeds of Distrust: Conflict in Uganda

Abstract

We study the e¤ect of civil con ‡ict on social capital, focusing on the experience of Uganda during the last decade. Using individual and county-level data, we document causal e¤ects on trust and ethnic identity of an exogenous outburst of ethnic con ‡icts in 2002-04. We exploit two waves of survey data from Afrobarometer 2000 and 2008, including information on socioeconomic characteristics at the individual level, and geo-referenced measures of …ghting events from ACLED. Our identi…cation strategy exploits variations in the intensity of …ghting both in the spatial and cross-ethnic dimensions. We …nd that more intense …ghting decreases generalized trust and increases ethnic identity. The e¤ects are quantitatively large and robust to a number of control variables, alternative measures of violence, and di¤erent statistical techniques involving ethnic and county …xed e¤ects and instrumental variables. We also document that the post-war e¤ects of ethnic violence depend on the ethnic fractionalization. Fighting has a negative e¤ect on the economic situation in highly fractionalized counties, but has no e¤ect in less fractionalized counties. Our …ndings are consistent with the existence of a self-reinforcing process between con ‡icts and ethnic cleavages.JEL Classi…cation: D74, O12, Z1.

Diversity and Conflict

“…To be clear, as corroborated by evidence from recent studies (e.g., Fletcher and Iyigun, 2010;Rohner, Thoenig and Zilibotti, 2013;Besley and Reynal-Querol, 2014), the unobserved historical cross-regional pattern of conflict risk may not only have persisted to the modern era through various mechanisms, but by triggering the movement of ethnic groups across space and reinforcing extant interethnic cleavages (along with the social, political, and economic grievances associated with such divisions), it may also have partly contributed to the contemporary variations observed across countries in the degree of ethnolinguistic fragmentation, the prevalence of interpersonal trust, and the intracountry dispersion in revealed political preferences. Thus, by potentially introducing endogeneity bias to the estimated coefficients associated with the proximate determinants of conflict risk, this issue calls for some caution with respect to interpreting our findings as being reflective of the actual role of these factors as mediators of the reduced-form contribution of genetic diversity to the potential for violent dissensions in contemporary national populations.…”

War Signals: A Theory of Trade, Trust and Conflict

“…In line with this prediction, Guiso et al (2009) provide evidence of a causal negative effect of the long-run intensity of bilateral warfare (over the 1000-1970 period) on the current level of bilateral trust and trade in a sample of European countries (see also Glick and Taylor, 2010). Looking at a more recent episode, in Rohner et al (2011) we find that post-conflict economic recovery in Uganda was especially slow in counties that both had been subject to intensive fighting and were more ethnically fractionalized (an interaction effect), likely because of the collapse of inter-ethnic business cooperation. Similarly, Cassar et al (2011) find that exposure to ethnic conflict in Tajikistan undermined the former victims' willingness to participate in market activity involving trade with people with whom they do not have a personal connection.…”

Truly reconciled? A dyadic analysis of post-conflict social reintegration in Northern Uganda

“…Generally speaking, aggregate proxy measures are used of social cohesion from various parts or periods of a conflict-affected area and the intertemporal or regional differences are taken as a measure of conflict's impact on such cohesion. Some find negative effects of conflict on interpersonal trust and cooperation (Colletta & Cullen, 2000;Thapa, 2003;Deng, 2010;Rohner et al, 2011;Cassar, Grosjean & Whitt, 2013;De Luca & Verpoorten, 2015), whereas others find positive effects of exposure to conflict on social cohesion, when that is proxied by participation in social activities, political engagement and community-level altruism (Bellows & Miguel, 2006;Blattman, 2009;Voors et al, 2012).…”