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| Type | Working Paper |
| Scope | Discipline-based scholarship |
| Title | Seeds of distrust: conflict in Uganda |
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| Institution | University of Zurich |
| Series Name | Working paper series / Department of Economics |
| Number | No. 54 |
| ISSN | 1664-7041 (P) 1664-705X (E) |
| Number of Pages | 47 |
| Date | 2011 |
| Abstract Text | We study the effect of civil conflict on social capital, focusing on the experience of Uganda during the last decade. Using individual and county-level data, we document causal effects on trust and ethnic identity of an exogenous outburst of ethnic conflicts in 2002-04. We exploit two waves of survey data from Afrobarometer 2000 and 2008, including information on socioeconomic characteristics at the individual level, and geo-referenced measures of fighting events from ACLED. Our identification strategy exploits variations in the intensity of fighting both in the spatial and cross-ethnic dimensions. We find that more intense fighting decreases generalized trust and increases ethnic identity. The effects are quantitatively large and robust to a number of control variables, alternative measures of violence, and different statistical techniques involving ethnic and county fixed effects and instrumental variables. We also document that the post-war effects of ethnic violence depend on the ethnic fractionalization. Fighting has a negative effect on the economic situation in highly fractionalized counties, but has no effect in less fractionalized counties. Our findings are consistent with the existence of a self-reinforcing process between conflicts and ethnic cleavages. |
| Official URL | http://www.econ.uzh.ch/static/wp/econwp054.pdf |
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| Keywords | Conflict, trust, ethnic fighting, social capital, identity, Uganda, Vertrauen, soziales Kapital, Minderheitenfrage, Bürgerkrieg |