Seeds of Distrust: Conflict in Uganda

Dominic Rohner, Mathias Thoenig and Fabrizio Zilibotti

No 112, HiCN Working Papers from Households in Conflict Network

Abstract: We study the effect of civil conflict on social capital, focusing on the experience of Uganda during the last decade. Using individual and county-level data, we document large causal effects on trust and ethnic identity of an exogenous outburst of ethnic conflicts in 2002-05. 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 fighting events from ACLED. Our identification strategy exploits variations in the intensity of fighting both in the spatial and cross-ethnic dimensions. We find that more intense fighting decreases generalized trust and increases ethnic identity. The effects are quantitatively large and robust to a number of control variables, alternative measures of violence, and different statistical techniques involving ethnic and spatial fixed effects and instrumental variables. We also document that the post-war effects of ethnic violence depend on the ethnic fractionalization. Fighting has a negative effect on the economic situation in highly fractionalized counties, but has no effect in less fractionalized counties. Our findings are consistent with the existence of a self-reinforcing process between conflicts and ethnic cleavages.

Keywords: ethnicity; violence; fractionalization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 52 pages
Date: 2012-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-dem, nep-dev, nep-evo and nep-soc
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Seeds of distrust: conflict in Uganda (2013)
Working Paper: Seeds of Distrust: Conflict in Uganda (2012)
Working Paper: Seeds of Distrust: Conflict in Uganda (2011)
Working Paper: Seeds of distrust: Conflict in Uganda (2011)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hic:wpaper:112

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