Mathieu Couttenier

Drought and Civil War in Sub-Saharan Africa

We explore the relationship between drought and civil war. We show that the link between rainfall, temperature and civil war found in the literature may be driven by aggregate shocks (such as global climate) that were not accounted for. A standard differences-in-differences specification relying only on within country variation reveals a much weaker and insignificant link between weather variables and civil war. To increase statistical power, we propose a country-specific measure of drought that describes social exposure to water stress in a more efficient way than rainfall and temperature. We continue to find a weak positive link between drought and civil war.

External Shocks, Internal Shots: The Geography of Civil Conflicts

We use georeferenced information on the location of violent events in sub-Saharan African countries and provide evidence that external income shocks are important determinants of the intensity and geography of civil conflicts. More precisely, we find that (a) the incidence, intensity, and onset of conflicts are generally negatively and significantly correlated with income variations at the local level; (b) this relationship is significantly weaker for the most remote locations; and (c) at the country level, these shocks have an insignificant impact on the overall probability of conflict outbreak but do affect the probability that conflicts start in the most opened regions.