Seeds of distrust: conflict in Uganda

By D. Rohner, Mathias Thoenig, Fabrizio Zilibotti. Journal of economic growth (Boston), 2012

343 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the effect of civil conflict on social capital, focusing on Uganda’s experience 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 2002–2005. We exploit two waves of survey data from Afrobarometer (Round 4 Afrobarometer Survey in Uganda, 2000, 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 both the spatial and ethnic intensity of fighting. 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. Controlling for the intensity of violence during the conflict, we also document that post-conflict economic recovery is slower in ethnically fractionalized counties. Our findings are consistent with the existence of a self-reinforcing process between conflicts and ethnic cleavages.

Subfields: Demography, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a3107411bce15b02c3bf0c87b0f6ebbfeeaae523

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Citations in the corpus

Conflict and Social and Political Preferences: Evidence from World War II and Civil Conflict in 35 European Countries (2014, unknown): “Rohner et al. (2013a) also model the negative legacy of conflict on inter-group trust: conflict signals the negative qualities of the opponent group, such as a negative propensity to trade or, more generally, other negative qualities, such as dishonesty or untrustworthiness.”
Violence, Empathy and Altruism: Evidence from the Ivorian Refugee Crisis in Liberia (2018, background): “First, consistent with theories of “parochial altruism” in psychology, several studies have suggested violence increases ingroup allegiance and hardens hostilities towards rival or potentially threatening ‘outgroups’ (Bauer et al. 2014; Beber et al. 2014; Rohner et al. 2013).”
Culture and the Historical Process (2012, background): “Rohner, Thoenig, and Zilibotti ( 2012 ) put forth evidence that civil conflict in Uganda decreases individuals’ trust in others and increases the salience of ethnicity.”