The Economics of Conflict and Peace
Media
Part of The Economics of Conflict and Peace
- Title
- The Economics of Conflict and Peace
- extracted text
-
The Economics of Conflict and Peace
DOMINIC ROHNER
Abstract
This essay takes stock of the existing literature in economics on the costs, consequences and causes of armed conflicts. The existing literature has put a particular
focus, among others, on the impact of ethnic diversity, natural resource abundance
and high poverty levels on the likelihood of conflict. Drawing on this, the current
essay highlights several broad emerging trends in this literature. First of all, more
and more papers use newly created, very fine-grained data. Second, there is a trend
towards linking more closely the empirical analysis to underlying theoretical frameworks. Third, there is a growing awareness of the importance of being policy relevant. Studying the impact of particular policies and institutions is likely to take a
more central importance in this literature in the coming years.
INTRODUCTION: TAKING STOCK OF EXISTING KEY FINDINGS
To know where we are going, we need to know where we stand and where we
come from. I will thus first describe in the section titled ‘Introduction: Taking
Stock of Existing Key Findings’ the main existing results in the literature on
the economics of conflict and peace.1 After this, I will describe in the section
titled ‘Cutting Edge and Emerging Trends’ what the main cutting-edge lines
of research and emerging trends are, and will then in the section titled ‘Conclusions and Forecast’ offer some conclusions and formulate—slightly more
speculative—views on which turn the literature may be taking in the coming
years.
COSTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF CONFLICT
The first question to always ask before plunging into a research topic is
whether it is relevant and important enough for international scholars to
study it. Thus, we shall start below by summarizing why conflicts are a
major problem requiring our attention.
1. A survey of the existing key findings in the literature is provided in Rohner (2016), on which section
titled “Introduction: Taking Stock of Existing Key Findings” of the current text draws.
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Robert Scott and Marlis Buchmann (General Editors) with Stephen Kosslyn (Consulting Editor).
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Human Lives Lost The foremost cost of conflict is, of course, in terms of
human lives. Between 1945 and 1999 an estimated 3.3 million people got
killed in 25 interstate wars, and 16.2 million direct fatalities took place in
127 civil wars (Fearon & Laitin, 2003). Diseases and other indirect effects
more than double this death toll (Ghobarah et al., 2003). Much violence also
occurs away from the battlefield, when armed troops turn their weapons
against defenseless civilians. Since World War II some 50 episodes of mass
killings have led to between 12 and 25 million civilian casualties (Political
Instability Task Force, 2010), involving in many cases the governments
attacking political or ethnic minority groups among the population, as
during the infamous Stalinist purges, the massacres committed by the Red
Khmer in Cambodia, and, more recently, the ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s
Darfur region.
Monetary Costs In addition, the economic costs of conflict are large: Civil
wars tend to reduce growth by 2.3% per year, so the average civil war which
lasts about 7 years reduces GDP (gross domestic product) by about 15% (Collier, 2007). Taking into account the direct and indirect costs of a civil war,
as well as spillovers to neighboring states, Collier (2007) estimates the cost
of a typical civil war at around $ 64 billion. Not only do major civil wars
such as the Second Congo War from 1998 to 2003 in the Democratic Republic
of Congo (DRC) killing millions have a major impact on the economy, even
comparatively mild forms of civil wars and terrorism, such as the conflicts in
the Basque Country and in Northern Ireland, leave crucial footprints on the
local economy. When estimating the costs of terrorism in the Basque country
between 1955 and 1995 by comparing it to a weighted average of comparable Spanish regions, Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003) show that Basque GDP
would be 10% higher today if ETA’s armed struggle had not happened.
Other Consequences of War It is of course important to bear in mind that the
costs of conflict are not just limited to death tolls and economic losses. There
is substantial evidence that conflict harms physical and mental health (Barenbaum et al., 2004) and that it drives down schooling and long-run educational
outcomes (Shemyakina, 2011). Finally, warfare also affects trust, political participation, and future crime behavior in the aftermath of conflict. There is still
a lively debate on the societal impact of war, with some papers finding that
conflict drives down intergroup trust (Rohner et al., 2013a) and makes war
victims more likely to engage in crime or conflict later in life (Couttenier et al.,
2016; Rohner et al., 2013b), while other papers conclude that conflict boosts
local collective action (see the survey of Bauer et al., 2016).
The Economics of Conflict and Peace
3
CAUSES OF CONFLICT
Ethnic Strive Recent research shows that ethnic and religious diversity are a
main driver of conflict. Economists have early on started to look for measures
that capture the importance of ethnic diversity. While ethnic fractionalization
(which is increasing in the number of groups) has also been found to correlate positively with conflict, the strongest effect has been found from ethnic
polarization (which is largest in a bipolar distribution of two similarly sized
groups facing each other) (Esteban et al., 2012; Montalvo & Reynal-Querol,
2005; Rohner, 2011).
Resource Curse Another empirical regularity that has received a lot of attention in recent years is that many resource-rich countries are poor (Collier &
Hoeffler, 2004; Fearon & Laitin, 2003). This, a paradoxical correlation at first
sight between natural resource abundance and poverty, has been dubbed
the “resource curse.” The channels that fuel the conflict-inducing impact of
Mother Nature’s riches are manifold as well. First, and most obviously, it
becomes more lucrative to conquer a place with more valuable resources
to capture (which has been found by many papers, for example, Lei &
Michaels, 2014). Another important reason why oil and other resources can
be dangerous for peace is that often they are not evenly distributed in a
given country. It is hence not only the total amount of natural resources
that matters but also how they are distributed over the territory (Morelli
& Rohner, 2015). The most dangerous situation is when most natural
resource fields are concentrated in the ethnic homelands of ethnic minority
groups that would be economically better off from splitting from the rest
of the country. Asymmetries in resource holdings have also been drivers
of various militarized interstate disputes in the past decades (Caselli et al.,
2015).
Besides fueling the risk of civil and interstate wars between armed groups,
oil has also been found to make massacres of civilians more lucrative for
cynical governments (Esteban et al., 2015). The government’s terrifying
trade-off is as follows: When reducing the size of a minority group (by mass
killings or expulsion), the government can increase its share of national
wealth to appropriate, but at the same time the size of the economy shrinks
(as less people produce less). When most of the national economy relies on
productive labor, the output is reduced so substantially after massacres that
they typically do not pay off for the government. In contrast, the extraction
of natural resources requires only relatively little local labor, hence in states
with natural resource extraction accounting for a large share of GDP, national
output shrinks relatively less after massacres, making the latter relatively
more lucrative for cynical governments.
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
The bad news continues, as natural resource abundance does not only
increase the likelihood of political violence taking place but also its diffusion
and length. According to the “feasibility hypothesis,” resource money
constitutes not only the “prize” or “pie” to appropriate but also helps paying
for the fighting while it happens. In the absence of perfect capital markets,
looting of resource rents allows rebels to fund their cause, expand their
zone of activity, and spread violence over a greater area and for a longer
time. Recent evidence in line with this view is provided by the study of the
conflict-inducing effect of mineral wealth by Berman et al. (2017).
Besides these direct effects, there are also several indirect ways in which
natural resources boost the conflict risk by undermining the state and
the economy. To start with, “rentier states” have less of a need to build
up fiscal capacity and a tax collection apparatus than other states, and
hence they tend to become weaker states with less state capacity and less
efficient bureaucracies (Besley & Persson, 2011). Further, by its very nature,
natural resource exploitation often requires very substantial amounts of
capital. While increased mineral and oil and gas prices lead to a boom in
the capital-intensive extraction industry, other, more labor-intensive sectors
suffer from less capital, which leads to a drop in wages, and hence reduced
opportunity costs of fighting, as shown by E. Dal Bó and P. Dal Bó (2011)
and Dube and Vargas (2013).
Plight of Poverty For many years, political scientists and economists
have documented the positive correlation between poverty and fighting. More recently, making use of rainfall deviations from the mean, a
series of papers have shown that a rise in poverty (i.e., due to drought
driving down agricultural yields) fuels the risk of conflict (Miguel et al.,
2004).
CUTTING EDGE AND EMERGING TRENDS
After having singled out some major consequences and causes of conflict
established in the existing literature, I shall now focus on a series of emerging
trends.
ADDRESSING STATISTICAL BIASES: DISAGGREGATION AND CREATION OF NEW DATA
The trend of focusing on putting together novel kinds of data has already
started about 10 years ago. While the pioneering work of Fearon and Laitin
(2003) and Collier and Hoeffler (2004) have highlighted various correlates
of conflict, many of the existing variables at that point of time were time
The Economics of Conflict and Peace
5
invariant, such as ethnic diversity measures or the shares of land covered by
mountainous terrain, or did not vary much over time. This means that much
of the statistical variation lay in the cross section of countries. The statistical
pitfall of this is the concern of potential omitted variable bias and unobserved
heterogeneity, as it is close to impossible to control for all the dimensions in
which countries differ. Further, in many countries conflicts are localized in
some part, for example, the Niger delta in Nigeria or FARC-controlled areas
in Colombia. Hence, by carrying out an analysis at the country level, much
statistical noise is added.
The quest for causal identification and for reducing unobserved heterogeneity has led scholars to consider a variety of avenues. While a small number of papers have focused on exploiting exogenous variation at the country
level (Miguel et al., 2004, making use of variation in country-level rainfall),
many papers in recent years have focused on exploiting within-country variation. Given that nationwide institutions are identical within countries and
that overall unobserved heterogeneity is typically smaller for within-country
studies in a variety of dimensions, focusing on different regions of a given
country reduces the risk of “comparing apples with pears.” Recent articles
using geographically disaggregated data to explain the causes and impact
of conflict include, among many others, Cederman et al. (2009), Cassar et al.
(2013), Dube and Vargas (2013), La Ferrara and Harari (2014), Michalopoulos
and Papaioannou (2016), Berman et al. (2017), and Mueller et al. (2017).
Working with disaggregate data not only serves the purpose of reducing
unobserved heterogeneity but at the same time allows to create new sets
of variables that previously have not been available. New variables of
course also mean new ways of testing existing or new theories. For example,
Michalopoulos and Papaioannou (2016) have created a novel measure of
partitioned ethnic groups, and La Ferrara and Harari (2014) have computed
agriculture-relevant shocks, taking into account the local crop coverage
and growing seasons. Such variables would have been impossible to put
together without drawing on disaggregate data.
LETTING THEORY GUIDE THE EMPIRICS
In recent years, there have been several papers trying to create a tight link
between a new theory and novel evidence testing the theory. To name a few
contributions, Besley and Persson (2011) have built a formal model of how
a variety of political and economic variables related to state capacity affect
the risk of conflict and have presented empirical findings in line with the
key predictions of the model. Similarly, Dube and Vargas (2013) start from
a theoretical model predicting contrasting effects of price shocks depending
on whether they occur in labor- or capital-intensive sectors and test this
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
using Colombian data to assess the impact of price shocks for labor-intensive
commodities (coffee) versus shocks to capital-intensive sectors (oil). Another
example of research linking theory to empirics is by Caselli et al. (2015)
who build a model of how distance of oil wells from international borders
affects the risk of interstate conflicts and test the predictions of the model,
putting together novel data on oil location for all county pairs around the
world.
Some papers also focus on estimating directly the coefficients of a structural
model (i.e., they start from a mathematical model and make use of the empirical data to compute the values of the variables of the model). For example,
König et al. (2017) integrate network spillovers into a contest model, allowing prediction of the impact of increased fighting effort of allies and enemies.
These spillover parameters are then structurally estimated, exploiting exogenous variation in rainfall. Similarly, Mueller et al. (2017) build a model of how
distance to potential targets affects recruiting efforts and attacks by sectarian
paramilitary groups, and then estimate the spatial weight coefficients of the
model using disaggregate data from Northern Ireland. They conclude that
there are indeed large transport costs of violence and that changing distances
between conflict parties can explain a large drop in violence.
BEING POLICY RELEVANT
Till recently, many of the papers in the literature have focused on drivers
of conflict that are easily measurable and relatively exogenous, such as
natural resource abundance, ethnic polarization, and exogenous income
variations (as discussed above). Policy and institutions of course also matter
heavily for conflict. However, policy-related determinants of conflict are
by their very nature harder to measure and are plagued by endogeneity
problems. Put bluntly, while variations in, say, rain are to a large extent
driven by exogenous factors linked to Mother Nature, variations in policies
such as education or health spending are to a large extent the product of
endogenous human choices, and it is harder to find some random variation
allowing a clean statistical identification of causality. This may be one of the
reasons why the role of policies and institutions for preventing conflict and
favoring successful post-war reconstruction has—till recently—received far
less attention in the literature. In recent years, however, there has been a
growing interest in being able to study policy-relevant questions.
First of all, the impact of institutions has received some attention in recent
years. Most empirical papers have found democracy to be a double-edged
knife, at the same time reducing grievances against the state but enabling
potential opponents to more easily coordinate anti-government action. In
particular, there is evidence for an “inverted U-shape”, that is, “anocracies”
The Economics of Conflict and Peace
7
(which are somewhere in the middle between full democracies and full
autocracies) fare worst (Fearon & Laitin, 2003; Hegre et al., 2001). Collier
and Rohner (2008) find that in poor countries the conflict-inducing effects of
democracy dominate, while in rich countries the peace-promoting channels
dominate. While democracy remains very attractive for all countries, the
fragility of poor democracies calls for support by the international community to alleviate poverty and increase the opportunity cost of fighting.
Moreover, Besley and Persson (2011) have emphasized the role of institutional constraints for peace by dealing with economic shocks. Power sharing
has received increasing attention recently. Cederman et al. (2013) show that
ethnic groups included in government show less propensity to engage in
insurgency, and Mueller and Rohner (2017) find that power sharing reduces
the scope for sectarian violence, using novel data from Northern Ireland.
Not just institutions but also specific policies have received a resurging
interest; for example, Berman et al. (2017) show that transparency initiatives
for declaring mineral origins as well as good corporate social responsibility
of mining firms can curb conflict. König et al. (2017) have found that while
arms embargoes, in many cases, may not be sufficient to drive down fighting, bilateral reconciliation and trying to demobilize key player groups in the
network can be promising in pacification. Nunn and Qian (2014) find that
US food aid had, in many cases, a rather neutral or harmful than positive
impact on pacification, while Dal Bó and Dal Bó (2011) have shown that subsidizing productive labor can play a key role in promoting peace. Couttenier
et al. (2016) find that the negative consequences of war exposure in terms of
future violent behavior can be countered by promoting labor market access
and integration in the society.
Very recently, there is also a trend toward using randomized control
trials (RCT)2 to study policy-relevant interventions. Cilliers, Dube, and
Siddiqi (2016) have treated some village with reconciliation meetings in a
post-conflict context while not holding such meetings in the control group.
They have found that such meetings indeed increase social capital but
decrease individual well-being. Focusing similarly on post-conflict reconstruction, Annan and Blattman (2016) study the reintegration of “high-risk
men” (many of whom were former combatants) in a post-conflict context.
CONCLUSIONS AND FORECAST
When children grow up, they become more mature. The same can be seen
in economic literatures on particular topics and fields. Trade economics and
2. As in medicine, in an RCT the pool of subjects or villages is randomly allocated between treatment
and control group, allowing to compare, say, a village subject to some policy with another very comparable
village that is for random reasons not subject to this policy.
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
labor economics, for example, have become ever more sophisticated over
the last few decades, pushing further the causal identification, reducing
statistical biases, using more disaggregate data, allowing a tighter link
between theory and empirics, and studying in as clean a way as possible the
impact of particular policies. Conflict and peace economics is going down
the same route. While it is a younger literature—at least in economics—it
is catching up rapidly in terms of methodological sophistication and is
in many aspects even leap-frogging, going beyond the gold standards of
other literatures, for example, as far as the use of geo-referenced data is
concerned.
While in terms of causal identification the conflict and peace literature has
already reached a high level of sophistication, the main catching up needed
is in terms of being able to give useful advice to policymakers as far as the
evaluation of particular policies is concerned. So far, we do not know enough
on what mix of policies can curb conflict and it is in this dimension where I
expect the biggest progress in the coming years. Of course, one needs to bear
in mind that studying policies is particularly hard as far as conflict is concerned, given that the stakes are very high, and experimenting with policies
is in many cases not possible. Still, RCTs can be an option when it comes to
things such as reconciliation initiatives, reintegration coaching, further professional training for former combatants, and when the interest from potential participants is much larger than the available budget. In this case, randomization of access may be ethically defendable and allows a clean impact
evaluation. We still know far too little about how to successfully promote
post-conflict reconstruction, so studies on this are very much encouraged.
A good alternative to RCTs is also to exploit existing random variation in
policies. For example, when a knife-edge electoral victory close to the 50%
votes threshold decides on the adoption of a given policy or when a given
policy reform is, for exogenous (e.g., budgetary) reasons, not implemented
in all parts of a country at the same time, then again this allows for relatively clean statistical identification of causality. In my opinion, it is worthwhile focusing much more on searching for such quasi-natural experiments
to study the impact of policies on conflict.
While studying conflict and peace is hard, it is well worth the effort, and
also the rewards of reducing slightly the human suffering from fighting
would be extremely high.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Dominic Rohner gratefully acknowledges financial support from the ERC
Starting Grant 677595 “Policies for Peace”.
The Economics of Conflict and Peace
9
REFERENCES
Abadie, A., & Gardeazabal, J. (2003). The economic costs of conflict: A case study of
the Basque Country. American Economic Review, 93, 113–132.
Annan, J., & Blattman, C. (2016). Can employment reduce lawlessness and rebellion?
A field experiment with high-risk men in a fragile state. American Political Science
Review, 110, 1–17.
Barenbaum, J., Ruchkin, V., & Schwab-Stone, M. (2004). The psychological aspects of
children exposed to war: Practice and policy initiatives. Journal of Child Psychology
and Psychiatry, 45, 41–62.
Bauer, M., Blattman, C., Chytilová, J., Henrich, J., Miguel, E., & Mitts, T. (2016). Can
war foster cooperation? Journal of Economic Perspectives, 30, 249–274.
Berman, N., Couttenier, M., Rohner, D., & Thoenig, M. (2017). This mine is mine!
How minerals fuel conflicts in Africa. American Economic Review, 107, 1564–1610.
Besley, T., & Persson, T. (2011). Pillars of prosperity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Caselli, F., Morelli, M., & Rohner, D. (2015). The geography of inter-state resource
wars. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 130, 267–315.
Cassar, A., Grosjean, P., & Whitt, S. (2013). Legacies of violence: Trust and market
development. Journal of Economic Growth, 18, 285–318.
Cederman, L.-E., Buhaug, H., & Rod, J. K. (2009). Ethno-nationalist dyads and civil
war: A GIS-based analysis. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 53, 496–525.
Cederman, L.-E., Gleditsch, K. S., & Buhaug, H. (2013). Inequality, grievances and civil
war. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Cilliers, J., Dube, O., & Siddiqi, B. (2016). Reconciling after civil conflict increases
social capital but decreases individual well-being. Science, 352, 787–794.
Collier, P. (2007). The bottom billion: Why the poorest countries are failing and what can be
done about it. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Collier, P., & Hoeffler, A. (2004). Greed and grievance in civil war. Oxford Economic
Papers, 56, 563–595.
Collier, P., & Rohner, D. (2008). Democracy, development, and conflict. Journal of the
European Economic Association, 6, 531–540.
Couttenier, M., Preotu, V., Rohner, D., & Thoenig, M. (2016). The violent legacy of victimization: Post-conflict evidence on asylum seekers, crimes and public policy in Switzerland. CEPR Discussion Paper 11079.
Dal Bó, E., & Dal Bó, P. (2011). Workers, warriors, and criminals: Social conflict in
general equilibrium. Journal of the European Economic Association, 9, 646–677.
Dube, O., & Vargas, J. (2013). Commodity price shocks and civil conflict: Evidence
from Colombia. Review of Economic Studies, 80, 1384–1421.
Esteban, J., Mayoral, L., & Ray, D. (2012). Ethnicity and conflict: An empirical investigation. American Economic Review, 102, 1310–1342.
Esteban, J., Morelli, M., & Rohner, D. (2015). Strategic mass killings. Journal of Political
Economy, 123, 1087–1132.
Fearon, J., & Laitin, D. (2003). Ethnicity, insurgency, and civil war. American Political
Science Review, 97, 75–90.
10
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Ghobarah, H., Huth, P., & Russett, B. (2003). Civil wars kill and maim people—Long
after the shooting stops. American Political Science Review, 97, 189–202.
Hegre, H., Ellingsen, T., Gates, S., & Gleditsch, N. P. (2001). Toward a democratic civil
peace? Democracy, political change, and civil war, 1816–1992. American Political
Science Review, 95, 33–48.
König, M., Rohner, D., Thoenig, M., & Zilibotti, F. (2017). Networks in conflict: Theory and evidence from the great war of Africa. Econometrica, 85, 1093–1132.
La Ferrara, E., & Harari, M. (2014). Conflict, climate and cells: A disaggregated analysis.
Mimeo, Bocconi University.
Lei, Y.-H., & Michaels, G. (2014). Do giant oil field discoveries fuel internal armed
conflicts? Journal of Development Economics, 110, 139–157.
Michalopoulos, S., & Papaioannou, E. (2016). The long-run effects of the scramble for
Africa. American Economic Review, 106, 1802–1848.
Miguel, E., Satyanath, S., & Sergenti, E. (2004). Economic shocks and civil conflict:
An instrumental variables approach. Journal of Political Economy, 112, 725–753.
Montalvo, J., & Reynal-Querol, M. (2005). Ethnic polarization, potential conflict, and
civil wars. American Economic Review, 95, 796–815.
Morelli, M., & Rohner, D. (2015). Resource concentration and civil wars. Journal of
Development Economics, 117, 32–47.
Mueller, H., & Rohner, D. (2017). Can power-sharing foster peace? Evidence from Northern Ireland. Working paper, IAE and University of Lausanne.
Mueller, H., Rohner, D., & Schönholzer, D. (2017). The peace dividend of distance: Violence as interaction across space. Working Paper, IAE, University of Lausanne and
UC Berkeley.
Nunn, N., & Qian, N. (2014). US food aid and civil conflict. American Economic Review,
104, 1630–1666.
Political Instability Task Force. (2010). Genocides. Dataset,
http://globalpolicy.gmu.edu/pitf/
Rohner, D. (2011). Reputation, group structure and social tensions. Journal of Development Economics, 96, 188–199.
Rohner, D. (2016). The economics of peace: Can “Swiss” institutions do the job?. Working
Paper, UBS Center Public Paper Nr. 5.
Rohner, D., Thoenig, M., & Zilibotti, F. (2013a). Seeds of distrust: Conflict in Uganda.
Journal of Economic Growth, 18, 217–252.
Rohner, D., Thoenig, M., & Zilibotti, F. (2013b). War signals: A theory of trade, trust
and conflict. Review of Economic Studies, 80, 1114–1147.
Shemyakina, O. (2011). The effect of armed conflict on accumulation of schooling:
Results from Tajikistan. Journal of Development Economics, 95, 186–200.
DOMINIC ROHNER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Dominic Rohner is a professor of Political and Institutional Economics at
HEC Lausanne, University of Lausanne, and a research fellow in the Development Economics Programme at the Centre for Economic Policy Research
The Economics of Conflict and Peace
11
(CEPR). Having obtained his PhD in economics from the University of
Cambridge in 2008, Dominic Rohner has held faculty positions at the
Universities of York and Zurich before starting as Assistant Professor of
Economics at the University of Lausanne in 2012. He is also an Associate
Editor of the Journal of the European Economic Association, and holds research
affiliations at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Zurich, Oslo, and
Sussex. His research focuses on political and development economics.
Several of his recent papers have studied the role of natural resources and
social capital for explaining armed conflict. His research has won several
prizes and has been widely published in journals.
RELATED ESSAYS
Global Economic Networks (Sociology), Nina Bandelj et al.
Political Conflict and Youth: A Long-Term View (Psychology), Brian K. Barber
Mediation in International Conflicts (Political Science), Kyle Beardsley and
Nathan Danneman
Reconciliation and Peace-Making: Insights from Studies on Nonhuman
Animals (Anthropology), Sonja E. Koski
Domestic Institutions and International Conflict (Political Science), Giacomo
Chiozza
States and Nationalism (Anthropology), Michael Herzfeld
Political Psychology and International Conflict (Sociology), Rose McDermott
Perceptions of the Legitimacy of Collective Decisions (Political Science),John
W. Patty
Organizations and the Production of Systemic Risk (Sociology), Charles
Perrow
War and Social Movements (Political Science), Sidney Tarrow
Why Do States Pursue Nuclear Weapons (or Not) (Political Science), Wilfred
Wan and Etel Solingen
-
The Economics of Conflict and Peace
DOMINIC ROHNER
Abstract
This essay takes stock of the existing literature in economics on the costs, consequences and causes of armed conflicts. The existing literature has put a particular
focus, among others, on the impact of ethnic diversity, natural resource abundance
and high poverty levels on the likelihood of conflict. Drawing on this, the current
essay highlights several broad emerging trends in this literature. First of all, more
and more papers use newly created, very fine-grained data. Second, there is a trend
towards linking more closely the empirical analysis to underlying theoretical frameworks. Third, there is a growing awareness of the importance of being policy relevant. Studying the impact of particular policies and institutions is likely to take a
more central importance in this literature in the coming years.
INTRODUCTION: TAKING STOCK OF EXISTING KEY FINDINGS
To know where we are going, we need to know where we stand and where we
come from. I will thus first describe in the section titled ‘Introduction: Taking
Stock of Existing Key Findings’ the main existing results in the literature on
the economics of conflict and peace.1 After this, I will describe in the section
titled ‘Cutting Edge and Emerging Trends’ what the main cutting-edge lines
of research and emerging trends are, and will then in the section titled ‘Conclusions and Forecast’ offer some conclusions and formulate—slightly more
speculative—views on which turn the literature may be taking in the coming
years.
COSTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF CONFLICT
The first question to always ask before plunging into a research topic is
whether it is relevant and important enough for international scholars to
study it. Thus, we shall start below by summarizing why conflicts are a
major problem requiring our attention.
1. A survey of the existing key findings in the literature is provided in Rohner (2016), on which section
titled “Introduction: Taking Stock of Existing Key Findings” of the current text draws.
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Robert Scott and Marlis Buchmann (General Editors) with Stephen Kosslyn (Consulting Editor).
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.
1
2
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Human Lives Lost The foremost cost of conflict is, of course, in terms of
human lives. Between 1945 and 1999 an estimated 3.3 million people got
killed in 25 interstate wars, and 16.2 million direct fatalities took place in
127 civil wars (Fearon & Laitin, 2003). Diseases and other indirect effects
more than double this death toll (Ghobarah et al., 2003). Much violence also
occurs away from the battlefield, when armed troops turn their weapons
against defenseless civilians. Since World War II some 50 episodes of mass
killings have led to between 12 and 25 million civilian casualties (Political
Instability Task Force, 2010), involving in many cases the governments
attacking political or ethnic minority groups among the population, as
during the infamous Stalinist purges, the massacres committed by the Red
Khmer in Cambodia, and, more recently, the ethnic cleansing in Sudan’s
Darfur region.
Monetary Costs In addition, the economic costs of conflict are large: Civil
wars tend to reduce growth by 2.3% per year, so the average civil war which
lasts about 7 years reduces GDP (gross domestic product) by about 15% (Collier, 2007). Taking into account the direct and indirect costs of a civil war,
as well as spillovers to neighboring states, Collier (2007) estimates the cost
of a typical civil war at around $ 64 billion. Not only do major civil wars
such as the Second Congo War from 1998 to 2003 in the Democratic Republic
of Congo (DRC) killing millions have a major impact on the economy, even
comparatively mild forms of civil wars and terrorism, such as the conflicts in
the Basque Country and in Northern Ireland, leave crucial footprints on the
local economy. When estimating the costs of terrorism in the Basque country
between 1955 and 1995 by comparing it to a weighted average of comparable Spanish regions, Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003) show that Basque GDP
would be 10% higher today if ETA’s armed struggle had not happened.
Other Consequences of War It is of course important to bear in mind that the
costs of conflict are not just limited to death tolls and economic losses. There
is substantial evidence that conflict harms physical and mental health (Barenbaum et al., 2004) and that it drives down schooling and long-run educational
outcomes (Shemyakina, 2011). Finally, warfare also affects trust, political participation, and future crime behavior in the aftermath of conflict. There is still
a lively debate on the societal impact of war, with some papers finding that
conflict drives down intergroup trust (Rohner et al., 2013a) and makes war
victims more likely to engage in crime or conflict later in life (Couttenier et al.,
2016; Rohner et al., 2013b), while other papers conclude that conflict boosts
local collective action (see the survey of Bauer et al., 2016).
The Economics of Conflict and Peace
3
CAUSES OF CONFLICT
Ethnic Strive Recent research shows that ethnic and religious diversity are a
main driver of conflict. Economists have early on started to look for measures
that capture the importance of ethnic diversity. While ethnic fractionalization
(which is increasing in the number of groups) has also been found to correlate positively with conflict, the strongest effect has been found from ethnic
polarization (which is largest in a bipolar distribution of two similarly sized
groups facing each other) (Esteban et al., 2012; Montalvo & Reynal-Querol,
2005; Rohner, 2011).
Resource Curse Another empirical regularity that has received a lot of attention in recent years is that many resource-rich countries are poor (Collier &
Hoeffler, 2004; Fearon & Laitin, 2003). This, a paradoxical correlation at first
sight between natural resource abundance and poverty, has been dubbed
the “resource curse.” The channels that fuel the conflict-inducing impact of
Mother Nature’s riches are manifold as well. First, and most obviously, it
becomes more lucrative to conquer a place with more valuable resources
to capture (which has been found by many papers, for example, Lei &
Michaels, 2014). Another important reason why oil and other resources can
be dangerous for peace is that often they are not evenly distributed in a
given country. It is hence not only the total amount of natural resources
that matters but also how they are distributed over the territory (Morelli
& Rohner, 2015). The most dangerous situation is when most natural
resource fields are concentrated in the ethnic homelands of ethnic minority
groups that would be economically better off from splitting from the rest
of the country. Asymmetries in resource holdings have also been drivers
of various militarized interstate disputes in the past decades (Caselli et al.,
2015).
Besides fueling the risk of civil and interstate wars between armed groups,
oil has also been found to make massacres of civilians more lucrative for
cynical governments (Esteban et al., 2015). The government’s terrifying
trade-off is as follows: When reducing the size of a minority group (by mass
killings or expulsion), the government can increase its share of national
wealth to appropriate, but at the same time the size of the economy shrinks
(as less people produce less). When most of the national economy relies on
productive labor, the output is reduced so substantially after massacres that
they typically do not pay off for the government. In contrast, the extraction
of natural resources requires only relatively little local labor, hence in states
with natural resource extraction accounting for a large share of GDP, national
output shrinks relatively less after massacres, making the latter relatively
more lucrative for cynical governments.
4
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
The bad news continues, as natural resource abundance does not only
increase the likelihood of political violence taking place but also its diffusion
and length. According to the “feasibility hypothesis,” resource money
constitutes not only the “prize” or “pie” to appropriate but also helps paying
for the fighting while it happens. In the absence of perfect capital markets,
looting of resource rents allows rebels to fund their cause, expand their
zone of activity, and spread violence over a greater area and for a longer
time. Recent evidence in line with this view is provided by the study of the
conflict-inducing effect of mineral wealth by Berman et al. (2017).
Besides these direct effects, there are also several indirect ways in which
natural resources boost the conflict risk by undermining the state and
the economy. To start with, “rentier states” have less of a need to build
up fiscal capacity and a tax collection apparatus than other states, and
hence they tend to become weaker states with less state capacity and less
efficient bureaucracies (Besley & Persson, 2011). Further, by its very nature,
natural resource exploitation often requires very substantial amounts of
capital. While increased mineral and oil and gas prices lead to a boom in
the capital-intensive extraction industry, other, more labor-intensive sectors
suffer from less capital, which leads to a drop in wages, and hence reduced
opportunity costs of fighting, as shown by E. Dal Bó and P. Dal Bó (2011)
and Dube and Vargas (2013).
Plight of Poverty For many years, political scientists and economists
have documented the positive correlation between poverty and fighting. More recently, making use of rainfall deviations from the mean, a
series of papers have shown that a rise in poverty (i.e., due to drought
driving down agricultural yields) fuels the risk of conflict (Miguel et al.,
2004).
CUTTING EDGE AND EMERGING TRENDS
After having singled out some major consequences and causes of conflict
established in the existing literature, I shall now focus on a series of emerging
trends.
ADDRESSING STATISTICAL BIASES: DISAGGREGATION AND CREATION OF NEW DATA
The trend of focusing on putting together novel kinds of data has already
started about 10 years ago. While the pioneering work of Fearon and Laitin
(2003) and Collier and Hoeffler (2004) have highlighted various correlates
of conflict, many of the existing variables at that point of time were time
The Economics of Conflict and Peace
5
invariant, such as ethnic diversity measures or the shares of land covered by
mountainous terrain, or did not vary much over time. This means that much
of the statistical variation lay in the cross section of countries. The statistical
pitfall of this is the concern of potential omitted variable bias and unobserved
heterogeneity, as it is close to impossible to control for all the dimensions in
which countries differ. Further, in many countries conflicts are localized in
some part, for example, the Niger delta in Nigeria or FARC-controlled areas
in Colombia. Hence, by carrying out an analysis at the country level, much
statistical noise is added.
The quest for causal identification and for reducing unobserved heterogeneity has led scholars to consider a variety of avenues. While a small number of papers have focused on exploiting exogenous variation at the country
level (Miguel et al., 2004, making use of variation in country-level rainfall),
many papers in recent years have focused on exploiting within-country variation. Given that nationwide institutions are identical within countries and
that overall unobserved heterogeneity is typically smaller for within-country
studies in a variety of dimensions, focusing on different regions of a given
country reduces the risk of “comparing apples with pears.” Recent articles
using geographically disaggregated data to explain the causes and impact
of conflict include, among many others, Cederman et al. (2009), Cassar et al.
(2013), Dube and Vargas (2013), La Ferrara and Harari (2014), Michalopoulos
and Papaioannou (2016), Berman et al. (2017), and Mueller et al. (2017).
Working with disaggregate data not only serves the purpose of reducing
unobserved heterogeneity but at the same time allows to create new sets
of variables that previously have not been available. New variables of
course also mean new ways of testing existing or new theories. For example,
Michalopoulos and Papaioannou (2016) have created a novel measure of
partitioned ethnic groups, and La Ferrara and Harari (2014) have computed
agriculture-relevant shocks, taking into account the local crop coverage
and growing seasons. Such variables would have been impossible to put
together without drawing on disaggregate data.
LETTING THEORY GUIDE THE EMPIRICS
In recent years, there have been several papers trying to create a tight link
between a new theory and novel evidence testing the theory. To name a few
contributions, Besley and Persson (2011) have built a formal model of how
a variety of political and economic variables related to state capacity affect
the risk of conflict and have presented empirical findings in line with the
key predictions of the model. Similarly, Dube and Vargas (2013) start from
a theoretical model predicting contrasting effects of price shocks depending
on whether they occur in labor- or capital-intensive sectors and test this
6
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
using Colombian data to assess the impact of price shocks for labor-intensive
commodities (coffee) versus shocks to capital-intensive sectors (oil). Another
example of research linking theory to empirics is by Caselli et al. (2015)
who build a model of how distance of oil wells from international borders
affects the risk of interstate conflicts and test the predictions of the model,
putting together novel data on oil location for all county pairs around the
world.
Some papers also focus on estimating directly the coefficients of a structural
model (i.e., they start from a mathematical model and make use of the empirical data to compute the values of the variables of the model). For example,
König et al. (2017) integrate network spillovers into a contest model, allowing prediction of the impact of increased fighting effort of allies and enemies.
These spillover parameters are then structurally estimated, exploiting exogenous variation in rainfall. Similarly, Mueller et al. (2017) build a model of how
distance to potential targets affects recruiting efforts and attacks by sectarian
paramilitary groups, and then estimate the spatial weight coefficients of the
model using disaggregate data from Northern Ireland. They conclude that
there are indeed large transport costs of violence and that changing distances
between conflict parties can explain a large drop in violence.
BEING POLICY RELEVANT
Till recently, many of the papers in the literature have focused on drivers
of conflict that are easily measurable and relatively exogenous, such as
natural resource abundance, ethnic polarization, and exogenous income
variations (as discussed above). Policy and institutions of course also matter
heavily for conflict. However, policy-related determinants of conflict are
by their very nature harder to measure and are plagued by endogeneity
problems. Put bluntly, while variations in, say, rain are to a large extent
driven by exogenous factors linked to Mother Nature, variations in policies
such as education or health spending are to a large extent the product of
endogenous human choices, and it is harder to find some random variation
allowing a clean statistical identification of causality. This may be one of the
reasons why the role of policies and institutions for preventing conflict and
favoring successful post-war reconstruction has—till recently—received far
less attention in the literature. In recent years, however, there has been a
growing interest in being able to study policy-relevant questions.
First of all, the impact of institutions has received some attention in recent
years. Most empirical papers have found democracy to be a double-edged
knife, at the same time reducing grievances against the state but enabling
potential opponents to more easily coordinate anti-government action. In
particular, there is evidence for an “inverted U-shape”, that is, “anocracies”
The Economics of Conflict and Peace
7
(which are somewhere in the middle between full democracies and full
autocracies) fare worst (Fearon & Laitin, 2003; Hegre et al., 2001). Collier
and Rohner (2008) find that in poor countries the conflict-inducing effects of
democracy dominate, while in rich countries the peace-promoting channels
dominate. While democracy remains very attractive for all countries, the
fragility of poor democracies calls for support by the international community to alleviate poverty and increase the opportunity cost of fighting.
Moreover, Besley and Persson (2011) have emphasized the role of institutional constraints for peace by dealing with economic shocks. Power sharing
has received increasing attention recently. Cederman et al. (2013) show that
ethnic groups included in government show less propensity to engage in
insurgency, and Mueller and Rohner (2017) find that power sharing reduces
the scope for sectarian violence, using novel data from Northern Ireland.
Not just institutions but also specific policies have received a resurging
interest; for example, Berman et al. (2017) show that transparency initiatives
for declaring mineral origins as well as good corporate social responsibility
of mining firms can curb conflict. König et al. (2017) have found that while
arms embargoes, in many cases, may not be sufficient to drive down fighting, bilateral reconciliation and trying to demobilize key player groups in the
network can be promising in pacification. Nunn and Qian (2014) find that
US food aid had, in many cases, a rather neutral or harmful than positive
impact on pacification, while Dal Bó and Dal Bó (2011) have shown that subsidizing productive labor can play a key role in promoting peace. Couttenier
et al. (2016) find that the negative consequences of war exposure in terms of
future violent behavior can be countered by promoting labor market access
and integration in the society.
Very recently, there is also a trend toward using randomized control
trials (RCT)2 to study policy-relevant interventions. Cilliers, Dube, and
Siddiqi (2016) have treated some village with reconciliation meetings in a
post-conflict context while not holding such meetings in the control group.
They have found that such meetings indeed increase social capital but
decrease individual well-being. Focusing similarly on post-conflict reconstruction, Annan and Blattman (2016) study the reintegration of “high-risk
men” (many of whom were former combatants) in a post-conflict context.
CONCLUSIONS AND FORECAST
When children grow up, they become more mature. The same can be seen
in economic literatures on particular topics and fields. Trade economics and
2. As in medicine, in an RCT the pool of subjects or villages is randomly allocated between treatment
and control group, allowing to compare, say, a village subject to some policy with another very comparable
village that is for random reasons not subject to this policy.
8
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
labor economics, for example, have become ever more sophisticated over
the last few decades, pushing further the causal identification, reducing
statistical biases, using more disaggregate data, allowing a tighter link
between theory and empirics, and studying in as clean a way as possible the
impact of particular policies. Conflict and peace economics is going down
the same route. While it is a younger literature—at least in economics—it
is catching up rapidly in terms of methodological sophistication and is
in many aspects even leap-frogging, going beyond the gold standards of
other literatures, for example, as far as the use of geo-referenced data is
concerned.
While in terms of causal identification the conflict and peace literature has
already reached a high level of sophistication, the main catching up needed
is in terms of being able to give useful advice to policymakers as far as the
evaluation of particular policies is concerned. So far, we do not know enough
on what mix of policies can curb conflict and it is in this dimension where I
expect the biggest progress in the coming years. Of course, one needs to bear
in mind that studying policies is particularly hard as far as conflict is concerned, given that the stakes are very high, and experimenting with policies
is in many cases not possible. Still, RCTs can be an option when it comes to
things such as reconciliation initiatives, reintegration coaching, further professional training for former combatants, and when the interest from potential participants is much larger than the available budget. In this case, randomization of access may be ethically defendable and allows a clean impact
evaluation. We still know far too little about how to successfully promote
post-conflict reconstruction, so studies on this are very much encouraged.
A good alternative to RCTs is also to exploit existing random variation in
policies. For example, when a knife-edge electoral victory close to the 50%
votes threshold decides on the adoption of a given policy or when a given
policy reform is, for exogenous (e.g., budgetary) reasons, not implemented
in all parts of a country at the same time, then again this allows for relatively clean statistical identification of causality. In my opinion, it is worthwhile focusing much more on searching for such quasi-natural experiments
to study the impact of policies on conflict.
While studying conflict and peace is hard, it is well worth the effort, and
also the rewards of reducing slightly the human suffering from fighting
would be extremely high.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Dominic Rohner gratefully acknowledges financial support from the ERC
Starting Grant 677595 “Policies for Peace”.
The Economics of Conflict and Peace
9
REFERENCES
Abadie, A., & Gardeazabal, J. (2003). The economic costs of conflict: A case study of
the Basque Country. American Economic Review, 93, 113–132.
Annan, J., & Blattman, C. (2016). Can employment reduce lawlessness and rebellion?
A field experiment with high-risk men in a fragile state. American Political Science
Review, 110, 1–17.
Barenbaum, J., Ruchkin, V., & Schwab-Stone, M. (2004). The psychological aspects of
children exposed to war: Practice and policy initiatives. Journal of Child Psychology
and Psychiatry, 45, 41–62.
Bauer, M., Blattman, C., Chytilová, J., Henrich, J., Miguel, E., & Mitts, T. (2016). Can
war foster cooperation? Journal of Economic Perspectives, 30, 249–274.
Berman, N., Couttenier, M., Rohner, D., & Thoenig, M. (2017). This mine is mine!
How minerals fuel conflicts in Africa. American Economic Review, 107, 1564–1610.
Besley, T., & Persson, T. (2011). Pillars of prosperity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Caselli, F., Morelli, M., & Rohner, D. (2015). The geography of inter-state resource
wars. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 130, 267–315.
Cassar, A., Grosjean, P., & Whitt, S. (2013). Legacies of violence: Trust and market
development. Journal of Economic Growth, 18, 285–318.
Cederman, L.-E., Buhaug, H., & Rod, J. K. (2009). Ethno-nationalist dyads and civil
war: A GIS-based analysis. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 53, 496–525.
Cederman, L.-E., Gleditsch, K. S., & Buhaug, H. (2013). Inequality, grievances and civil
war. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Cilliers, J., Dube, O., & Siddiqi, B. (2016). Reconciling after civil conflict increases
social capital but decreases individual well-being. Science, 352, 787–794.
Collier, P. (2007). The bottom billion: Why the poorest countries are failing and what can be
done about it. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Collier, P., & Hoeffler, A. (2004). Greed and grievance in civil war. Oxford Economic
Papers, 56, 563–595.
Collier, P., & Rohner, D. (2008). Democracy, development, and conflict. Journal of the
European Economic Association, 6, 531–540.
Couttenier, M., Preotu, V., Rohner, D., & Thoenig, M. (2016). The violent legacy of victimization: Post-conflict evidence on asylum seekers, crimes and public policy in Switzerland. CEPR Discussion Paper 11079.
Dal Bó, E., & Dal Bó, P. (2011). Workers, warriors, and criminals: Social conflict in
general equilibrium. Journal of the European Economic Association, 9, 646–677.
Dube, O., & Vargas, J. (2013). Commodity price shocks and civil conflict: Evidence
from Colombia. Review of Economic Studies, 80, 1384–1421.
Esteban, J., Mayoral, L., & Ray, D. (2012). Ethnicity and conflict: An empirical investigation. American Economic Review, 102, 1310–1342.
Esteban, J., Morelli, M., & Rohner, D. (2015). Strategic mass killings. Journal of Political
Economy, 123, 1087–1132.
Fearon, J., & Laitin, D. (2003). Ethnicity, insurgency, and civil war. American Political
Science Review, 97, 75–90.
10
EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES
Ghobarah, H., Huth, P., & Russett, B. (2003). Civil wars kill and maim people—Long
after the shooting stops. American Political Science Review, 97, 189–202.
Hegre, H., Ellingsen, T., Gates, S., & Gleditsch, N. P. (2001). Toward a democratic civil
peace? Democracy, political change, and civil war, 1816–1992. American Political
Science Review, 95, 33–48.
König, M., Rohner, D., Thoenig, M., & Zilibotti, F. (2017). Networks in conflict: Theory and evidence from the great war of Africa. Econometrica, 85, 1093–1132.
La Ferrara, E., & Harari, M. (2014). Conflict, climate and cells: A disaggregated analysis.
Mimeo, Bocconi University.
Lei, Y.-H., & Michaels, G. (2014). Do giant oil field discoveries fuel internal armed
conflicts? Journal of Development Economics, 110, 139–157.
Michalopoulos, S., & Papaioannou, E. (2016). The long-run effects of the scramble for
Africa. American Economic Review, 106, 1802–1848.
Miguel, E., Satyanath, S., & Sergenti, E. (2004). Economic shocks and civil conflict:
An instrumental variables approach. Journal of Political Economy, 112, 725–753.
Montalvo, J., & Reynal-Querol, M. (2005). Ethnic polarization, potential conflict, and
civil wars. American Economic Review, 95, 796–815.
Morelli, M., & Rohner, D. (2015). Resource concentration and civil wars. Journal of
Development Economics, 117, 32–47.
Mueller, H., & Rohner, D. (2017). Can power-sharing foster peace? Evidence from Northern Ireland. Working paper, IAE and University of Lausanne.
Mueller, H., Rohner, D., & Schönholzer, D. (2017). The peace dividend of distance: Violence as interaction across space. Working Paper, IAE, University of Lausanne and
UC Berkeley.
Nunn, N., & Qian, N. (2014). US food aid and civil conflict. American Economic Review,
104, 1630–1666.
Political Instability Task Force. (2010). Genocides. Dataset,
http://globalpolicy.gmu.edu/pitf/
Rohner, D. (2011). Reputation, group structure and social tensions. Journal of Development Economics, 96, 188–199.
Rohner, D. (2016). The economics of peace: Can “Swiss” institutions do the job?. Working
Paper, UBS Center Public Paper Nr. 5.
Rohner, D., Thoenig, M., & Zilibotti, F. (2013a). Seeds of distrust: Conflict in Uganda.
Journal of Economic Growth, 18, 217–252.
Rohner, D., Thoenig, M., & Zilibotti, F. (2013b). War signals: A theory of trade, trust
and conflict. Review of Economic Studies, 80, 1114–1147.
Shemyakina, O. (2011). The effect of armed conflict on accumulation of schooling:
Results from Tajikistan. Journal of Development Economics, 95, 186–200.
DOMINIC ROHNER SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Dominic Rohner is a professor of Political and Institutional Economics at
HEC Lausanne, University of Lausanne, and a research fellow in the Development Economics Programme at the Centre for Economic Policy Research
The Economics of Conflict and Peace
11
(CEPR). Having obtained his PhD in economics from the University of
Cambridge in 2008, Dominic Rohner has held faculty positions at the
Universities of York and Zurich before starting as Assistant Professor of
Economics at the University of Lausanne in 2012. He is also an Associate
Editor of the Journal of the European Economic Association, and holds research
affiliations at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Zurich, Oslo, and
Sussex. His research focuses on political and development economics.
Several of his recent papers have studied the role of natural resources and
social capital for explaining armed conflict. His research has won several
prizes and has been widely published in journals.
RELATED ESSAYS
Global Economic Networks (Sociology), Nina Bandelj et al.
Political Conflict and Youth: A Long-Term View (Psychology), Brian K. Barber
Mediation in International Conflicts (Political Science), Kyle Beardsley and
Nathan Danneman
Reconciliation and Peace-Making: Insights from Studies on Nonhuman
Animals (Anthropology), Sonja E. Koski
Domestic Institutions and International Conflict (Political Science), Giacomo
Chiozza
States and Nationalism (Anthropology), Michael Herzfeld
Political Psychology and International Conflict (Sociology), Rose McDermott
Perceptions of the Legitimacy of Collective Decisions (Political Science),John
W. Patty
Organizations and the Production of Systemic Risk (Sociology), Charles
Perrow
War and Social Movements (Political Science), Sidney Tarrow
Why Do States Pursue Nuclear Weapons (or Not) (Political Science), Wilfred
Wan and Etel Solingen