Crops, Shocks, and Local-Level Ethnic Conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa

• In Event: The Environment and Conflict

Abstract

What explains local-level conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa? Recent quantitative research uses climate and price variation to identify causal effects of economic shocks on conflict incidence in agriculture-dependent regions. Beyond the relatively generic opportunity cost and rapacity mechanisms, the causal channels and scope conditions remain elusive. In this paper, I show that
agriculture-related conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa is about more than just income fluctuations or economic vulnerability to weather shocks and climate change. Instead, local conflict is most likely where a historically inherited mix of communal governance and ethnic diversity fuels ethnic competition between “sons of the soil” and in-migrating “ethnic strangers”. Such conditions are most likely to prevail in areas that have produced export crops from the colonial age onward. I use fine-grained geospatial data on historical and current resource production, conflict events, weather shocks, world market prices, and local-level ethnic demography to test my argument. Preliminary findings suggest that economic downturns have stronger conflict-inducing effects in more “modern” and developed cash crop regions than in other areas that depend on agriculture. What’s more, these effects are entirely driven by ethnically heterogeneous cash crop zones, indicating that agricultural conflict in Africa has an identity component that the previous quantitative literature tends to ignore.

Author

• Yannick Immanuel Pengl, ETH Zurich