Eleonora Nillesen

A Phoenix in Flames? Portfolio Choice and Violence in Civil War in rural Burundi

This paper challenges the idea that farmers revert to subsistence farming when confronted with violence from civil war. While there is an emerging macroeconomic consensus that wars are detrimental to development, we find contrasting microeconomic evidence. Using several rounds of (panel) data at the farm and community level, we find that farmers in Burundi who are confronted with civil war violence in their home communities increase export and cash crop growing activities, invest more in public goods and reveal higher levels subjective welfare evaluations. We interpret this in the light of similar recent micro-level evidence that points to post-traumatic growth effects after (civil) warfare. Our results are confirmed across specifications as well as in robustness analyses.

Grievance, Commodity Prices and Rainfall: A Village-level Analysis of Rebel Recruitment in Burundi

Grievance and reduced opportunity costs are two popular ideas within the civil war literature to explain participation in violent rebellion. We test both hypotheses at the village-level using data on recruitment activities during the civil war in Burundi. We use historical data on violent attacks in 1972 and 1988 as a proxy for grievance. The cross-sectional analyses report no effect of grievance on the likelihood of recruitment. By contrast, they do show tentative support for the idea that reduced opportunity costs may promote recruitment. Villages that had above mean incidents of insufficient rain were more likely to have recruitment activities than others. We find similar results when we use recall information on recruitment to construct a 13-year panel. Negative income shocks through adverse weather conditions are a strong predictor of recruitment. By contrast we find no effect of commodity price shocks. These findings are consistent with a recent conclusion from literature: commodity price shocks show no robust relationship with civil war violence while weather shocks do.