Christopher Blattman

From Violence to Voting: War and Political Participation in Uganda

What is the political legacy of violent conflict? I present evidence for a link from past violence to increased political engagement among excombatants. The evidence comes from northern Uganda, where rebel recruitment generated quasiexperimental variation in who was conscripted by abduction. Survey data suggest that abduction leads to substantial increases in voting and community leadership, largely due to elevated levels of violence witnessed. Meanwhile, abduction and violence do not appear to affect nonpolitical participation. These patterns are not easily explained by conventional theories of participation, including mobilization by elites, differential costs, and altruistic preferences. Qualitative interviews suggest that violence may lead to personal growth and political activation, a possibility supported by psychological research on the positive effects of traumatic events. Although the generalizability of these results requires more evidence to judge, the findings challenge our understanding of political behavior and point to important new avenues of research.

The Consequences of Child Soldiering

Little is known about the impacts of military service on human capital and labor market outcomes due to an absence of data as well as sample selection: recruits are self-selected, screened, and selectively survive. We examine the case of Uganda, where rebel recruitment methods provide exogenous variation in conscription. Economic and educational impacts are widespread and persistent: schooling falls by nearly a year, skilled employment halves, and earnings drop by a third. Military service seems to be a poor substitute for schooling. Psychological distress is evident among those exposed to severe war violence and is not limited to ex-combatants.

Civil War, Reintegration, and Gender in Northern Uganda

What are the impacts of war on the participants, and do they vary by gender? Are ex-combatants damaged pariahs who threaten social stability, as some fear? Existing theory and evidence are both inconclusive and focused on males. New data and a tragic natural quasi-experiment in Uganda allow us to estimate the impacts of war on both genders, and assess how war experiences affect reintegration success. As expected, violence drives social and psychological problems, especially among females. Unexpectedly, however, most women returning from armed groups reintegrate socially and are resilient. Partly for this reason, postconflict hostility is low. Theories that war conditions youth into violence find little support. Finally, the findings confirm a human capital view of recruitment: economic gaps are driven by time away from civilian education and labor markets. Unlike males, however, females have few civilian opportunities and so they see little adverse economic impact of recruitment.

Child combatants in northern Uganda: Reintegration myths and realities

At a recent Paris conference on child soldiering, the keynote speaker, French foreign minister Philippe Douste-Blazy, warned that the use of child soldiers is “a time bomb that threatens stability and growth in Africa and beyond.” They are “lost children,” he argued, “lost for peace and lost for the development of their countries.” (BBC, 2007) This lost generation metaphor has become a commonplace in discussions of child soldiers, who are presumed to return from war traumatized, stigmatized, and broken. “They are walking ghosts,” mourns a recent New York Times (2006) editorial, “damaged, uneducated pariahs.” . While such alarming assertions attract much-needed attention and money to the reintegration of former child soldiers, the evidence to support these claims is weak at best. In fact, the evidence to support almost any claim is sadly lacking. Studies of child soldiers—and indeed of ex-combatants in general—are few in number and largely case-based, drawing on interviews with former participants. While such studies have yielded important insights for reintegration of young ex-fighters, the evidence base is still thin. With interview accounts, moreover, one worries that the most sensational rather than the most common experiences find their way into discourse. In the absence of representative data within and across conflicts, we have little sense of the proportionality and generalizability of any findings. This chapter con-

How to promote order and property rights under weak rule of law? : an experiment in changing dispute resolution behavior through community education

This brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study, entitled How to promote order and property rights under weak rule of law? : an experiment in changing dispute resolution behavior through community education, conducted between 2009 and 2010 in Liberia. The study observed the impact of mass education campaigns in Liberia, where property disputes are endemic on the community level. In treated communities, land disputes are 29 percent less likely to remain unsolved at the end of the year and 32 percent less likely to result in property destruction. Disputants are 10 percent more satisfied with the outcomes. These effects are strongest among the most longstanding disputes. There are unintended consequences. There are large increases in informal extrajudicial punishment, and increases in fights, youth-elder disputes, and demonstration. These are mostly non-violent, and violent conflict decreases, but not in a statistically significant way. There is a non-significant positive impact on attitudes towards womens and minority rights. Funding for the study derived from the United Nations Peace Building Fund in Liberia, Humanity United, Yale University, and The World Banks Italian Children and Youth Trust Fund.

Employment Generation in Rural Africa: Mid-Term Results from an Experimental Evaluation of the Youth Opportunities Program in Northern Uganda

This brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study, entitled Employment generation in rural Africa : mid-term results from an experimental evaluation of the youth opportunities program in Northern Uganda, conducted in the year 2008, in Uganda. The study observed that mid-term results after two years suggest four main findings. First, despite a lack of central monitoring and accountability, most youth invest the transfer in vocational skills and tools. Second, the economic impacts of the transfer are large. Third, the evidence suggests that poor access to credit is a major reason youth cannot start these vocations in the absence of aid. Finally, these economic gains result in modest improvements in social stability. The outcomes are split into three themes: Economic, Alienation, and Subjective Well-being. For each theme, the results are summed and presented as a z-score. The economic impacts are large with an increase in .28 standard deviations. The male and female economic impacts are similar. Funding for the study derives from Gender Action Plan, Uganda Social Action Fund, Spanish Impact Evaluation Fund.

Generating Employment in Poor and Fragile States: Evidence from Labor Market and Entrepreneurship Programs

The worlds poor -- and programs to raise their incomes -- are increasingly concentrated in fragile states. We review the evidence on what interventions work, and whether stimulating employment promotes social stability. Skills training and microfinance have shown little impact on poverty or stability, especially relative to program cost. In contrast, injections of capital -- cash, capital goods, or livestock -- seem to stimulate self-employment and raise long term earning potential, often when partnered with low-cost complementary interventions. Such capital-centric programs, alongside cash-for-work, may be the most effective tools for putting people to work and boosting incomes in poor and fragile states. We argue that policymakers should shift the balance of programs in this direction. If targeted to the highest risk men, we should expect such programs to reduce crime and other materially-motivated violence modestly. Policymakers, however, should not expect dramatic effects of employment on crime and violence, in part because some forms of violence do not respond to incomes or employment. Finally, this review finds that more investigation is needed in several areas. First, are skills training and other interventions cost-effective complements to capital injections? Second, what non-employment strategies reduce crime and violence among the highest risk men, and are they complementary to employment programs? Third, policymakers can reduce the high failure rate of employment programs by using small-scale pilots before launching large programs; investing in labor market panel data; and investing in multi-country studies to test and fine tune the most promising interventions.

Occupational Choice in Early Industrializing Societies: Experimental Evidence on the Income and Health Effects of Industrial and Entrepreneurial Work

Working with five Ethiopian firms, we randomized applicants to an industrial job offer, an “entrepreneurship�? program of

Predicting Local Violence: Evidence from a Panel Survey in Liberia

300 plus business training, or control status. Industrial jobs offered more and steadier hours but low wages and risky conditions. The job offer doubled exposure to industrial work but, since most quit within months, had no impact on employment or income after a year. Applicants largely took industrial work to cope with adverse shocks. This exposure, meanwhile, significantly increased health problems. The entrepreneurship program raised earnings 33 percent and provided steadier hours. When barriers to self-employment were relieved, applicants preferred entrepreneurial to industrial labor.

Does poverty alleviation decrease depression symptoms in post-conflict settings? A cluster-randomized trial of microenterprise assistance in Northern Uganda

Riots, murders, lynchings, and other forms of local violence are costly to security forces and society at large. Identifying risk factors and forecasting where local violence is most likely to occur should help allocate scarce peacekeeping and policing resources. Most forecasting exercises of this kind rely on structural or event data, but these have many limitations in the poorest and most war-torn states, where the need for prediction is arguably most urgent. We adopt an alternative approach, applying machine learning techniques to original panel survey data from Liberia to predict collective, interpersonal, and extrajudicial violence two years into the future. We first train our models to predict 2010 local violence using 2008 risk factors, then generate forecasts for 2012 before collecting new data. Our models achieve out-of-sample AUCs ranging from 0.65 to 0.74, depending on our specification of the dependent variable. The models also draw our attention to risk factors different from those typically emphasized in studies aimed at causal inference alone. For example, we find that while ethnic heterogeneity and polarization are reliable predictors of local violence, adverse economic shocks are not. Surprisingly, we also find that the risk of local violence is higher rather than lower in communities where minority and majority ethnic groups share power. These counter-intuitive results illustrate the usefulness of prediction for generating new stylized facts for future research to explain. Ours is one of just two attempts to forecast local violence using survey data, and we conclude by discussing how our approach can be replicated and extended as similar datasets proliferate.