Winning hearts and minds through development ? evidence from a field experiment in Afghanistan

By A. Beath, Fotini Christia, R. Enikolopov. 2012

190 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In areas afflicted by civil conflict, development projects can potentially serve an important counterinsurgency function by redressing grievances of marginalized groups and reducing violence. Using a large-scale randomized field experiment in Afghanistan, this paper explores whether the inclusion of villages in the country's largest development program alters perceptions of well-being, attitudes toward government, and violence in surrounding areas. The results indicate that the program generally has a positive effect on all three measures, but has no effects in areas with high levels of initial violence. These findings demonstrate that development programs can buttress government support and limit the onset of insurgencies in relatively secure areas, but that their effectiveness is more constrained in areas where insurgents are already active.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eb9c951f6908ba78a1c64583e9eb35d2329d0b79

Citations in the corpus

• Nation Building Through Foreign Intervention: Evidence from Discontinuities in Military Strategies (2018, unknown): “Using a randomized experiment, Beath et al. (2012) show that participating in the largest development program in Afghanistan improves perceptions of well-being, attitudes towards the government, and levels of security, but only in relatively secure regions, and Blattman and Annan (2015) find that a ”