The Brides of Boko Haram: Economic Shocks, Marriage Practices, and Insurgency in Nigeria

Abstract

Marriage markets in rural Nigeria are characterised by bride price and polygamy. These customs may diminish marriage prospects for young men, causing them to join militant groups. Using an instrumental variables strategy, I find that marriage inequality increases civil conflict in the Boko Haram insurgency. To generate exogenous shocks to the marriage market, I exploit the fact that young women delay marriage in response to favourable pre-marital economic conditions, which increases marriage inequality primarily in polygamous villages. The same shocks that increase marriage inequality and extremist violence also lead women to marry fewer and richer husbands, generate higher average marriage expenditures, and increase insurgent abductions. The results shed light on the marriage market as an important driver of violent extremism.

Unbundling female empowerment

“…Marriage market procedures and outcomes may also be affected by increased resource allocations to women that can again switch back to negatively affect them. Rexer (2022) found that when young women experienced positive income realizations, they became more demanding over the types of men they were willing to marry. In polygynous places, this led to women being more likely to match with wealthier, already married men, thus exacerbating societal “marriage inequality” and leading to more young men being excluded from the marriage market.…”

Bribery, insecurity, and firm performance: Evidence from the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria

“…The number of attacks is instrumented using the interaction between local polygamy and whether there was a rainfall shock in the local community during the average local woman's adolescence, which is meant to capture exogenous reductions in the number of available brides in the local community, which increases the number of unmarried men who are likelier to become Boko Haram recruits. This approach was adapted from Rexer (2022) and is further detailed in Appendix A14. The IV regressions replicate the main findings from Table 2.…”

“…Events are identified using a broad range of local and international news sources, which are cross‐referenced and cited in each data point. This dataset has previously been used in public health and economics research on Boko Haram (Chukwuma & Ekhator‐Mobayode, 2019; Rexer, 2022).…”

Integrating economic and evolutionary approaches to polygynous marriage

“…With the increasing availability of geo-located spatial data that can be merged onto household-level surveys, this type of analysis is becoming more common. Rexer (2022) exploits this type of geospatial data to explore the relationship between polygyny and societal conflict to test the hypothesis that societies can be destabilized when a large mass of young men are excluded from the marriage market ( Krieger and Renner (2020), Koos and Neupert-Wentz (2020), Henrich et al (2012)). The outcome of focus is the number of Boko-Haram deaths within communities across Northern Nigeria.…”