Strategies to Prevent Violence and Extremism: Latest Evidence and New Frontiers

Session Submission Type: In-Person Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Background and objectives

Recent strategies to prevent violence and violent extremism in fragile states have tended to lean on the theory that individuals—especially at-risk youth—will respond to rising opportunity costs represented by, e.g., a decent job, by turning away from extremism and engaging productively in social and political life. However, the theoretical and empirical bases on which many strategies rest are often weak at best and non-existent at worst. While in recent years a growing number of randomized experiments focused on establishing the links between economic strategies such as employment policies and programs and actual labor market outcomes in poor and fragile states, with very few exception (e.g., Blattman and Annan, 2016), few empirical studies investigate the links between employment and violence or the social and political behaviors, which are presumed to underpin social stability—a key goal in fragile states (Blattman and Ralston, 2015).

The proposed panel will bring together scholars who are at the forefront of this research agenda to explore economic and social strategies to prevent violent extremism and promote social stability in fragile states (Ferguson et.al, 2019.) It will leverage the latest experimental evidence on this important subject and provide a forum for spirited and stimulating discussions about the role of employment policies and programs in addressing violence and social and political participation in fragile states through the prism of social and behavioral sciences, with the view to identifying new research frontiers to help further this exciting agenda. Finally, by bringing together economists and political scientists, this panel will foster the kind of interdisciplinary research and collaboration necessary to investigate these complex issues adequately.

Panel composition

In view of the afore-stated objectives, we assembled a diverse group of scholars who are studying different strategies to prevent violent extremism and promote social stability through cutting-edge empirical research in a wide variety fragile contexts—from Afghanistan to Nepal to Nigeria to Jordan and Lebanon, among others. The panel will display a collection of empirical papers, which cover 3 sets of issues (details on paper titles, abstracts and authors are provided further below):

• Links between employment and violence in fragile states, including political, social and religious extremism, which will be explored through: (i) recent experimental evidence from a donor-funded employment project targeting marginalized youth previously in Islamic schools—the so-called Almajirai, and Islamic Quranic Education (IQE) girls in Northern Nigeria—and which reveal small effects on religious attitudes and behaviors, but substantial heterogeneity; and (ii) a project on causal inference with spatio-temporal data that tries to estimate how World Bank aid in Afghanistan affected Taliban violence.

• Links between employment and violence and cooperative behaviors in the context of forced displacement, which will be explored through new experimental work in Jordan and Lebanon showing not only the effects of the employment program evaluated on cooperative behaviors, but also helping us to understand the types of violence in which employment programs may be most useful for addressing violence, or how they may be constructed to do so.

• Strategies to create social climates and norms against violence and intolerance, which will be explored through evidence from a randomized control trial of a pro-tolerance bystander intervention training program among university students in Bangladesh.

Sub Unit

• Division 21: Conflict Processes

Individual Presentations

• A Way Out? Vocational Training, Employment & Religious Extremism in Nigeria - Oeindrila Dube; Marcus Holmlund, The World Bank; Eric N. Mvukiyehe

• Can Vocational Training Programs Reduce Bias Between Hosts and Refugees? - Rebecca Wolfe, University of Chicago

• Climates Against Violent Extremism: RCT with University Students in Bangladesh - Peter B. Vining, Naval Postgraduate School; Michael J. Gilligan, New York University; Cyrus Samii, New York University

• Jobs and Political Participation – Evidence from a Field Experiment in Ethiopia - Andreas Kotsadam, The Frisch Centre

Chair

• Eric N. Mvukiyehe

Discussants

• Bilal Murtaza Siddiqi University of California, Berkeley

• Rebecca Littman MIT