The Political Legacies of Wartime Suffering: Forced Displacement in Zimbabwe

• In Event: Forced Displacement, Wartime Refugees, and Integration

Abstract

During civil war, governments use forced displacement and resettlement as a strategy of counterinsurgency and social control. How do such strategies affect civilian political attitudes after the conclusion of conflict? This paper examines the use of Protected Villages (PVs) in the Zimbabwe Liberation War, which took root in the early 1960s as a political movement before escalating into a civil war between 1972 and 1979. PVs — a Rhodesian counterinsurgency strategy — was a large-scale villagization program used to deprive rebels of support and to undermine the local informal governance structures that aided the rebellion. Using archival data, I map pre-war to current-day administrative divisions to determine populations affected by PVs during war. I then leverage geographical variation of PVs to estimate a difference-in-discontinuities regression. Results identify the ways in which such forced resettlement programs affect a community’s socio-political views decades after conflict.

Author

• Shelley Liu, UC Berkeley