War and local collective action in Sierra Leone

Abstract

We study the brutal 1991–2002 Sierra Leone civil war using nationally representative household data on conflict experiences, postwar economic outcomes, local politics and collective action. Individuals whose households directly experienced more intense war violence are robustly more likely to attend community meetings, more likely to join local political and community groups, and more likely to vote. Tests using prewar controls and alternative samples suggest that selection into victimization is unlikely to be driving the results. More speculatively, the findings could help partially explain the rapid postwar political and economic recoveries observed in Sierra Leone and after several other recent African civil wars.

Introduction

This paper analyzes a novel nationally representative dataset from postwar Sierra Leone with the goal of better understanding the short-run economic and political impacts of civil war. Political violence has been a prominent feature of recent African history: over two-thirds of sub-Saharan African countries experienced a civil conflict episode since 1980. Some scholars claim that these wars have played a major role in the region's disappointing recent economic performance. For example, a recent World Bank report claims: “[t]he legacy effects of civil war are usually so adverse that they cannot reasonably be viewed as social progress…[Civil war] has been development in reverse” (World Bank 2003: 32). Yet the rapid postwar recovery experiences of some African countries after brutal civil wars – notably, Mozambique and Uganda – suggest that wars need not always have persistent negative economic consequences: in the decade following the end of their wars, Mozambique and Uganda experienced annual per capita income growth of 3.9% and 4.6%, respectively, well above the African average (United Nations, 2004).

Other recent research has shown that the long-run effects of war on population and economic growth are typically minor. Studies that focus on United States bombing – including in Japan (Davis and Weinstein 2002), Germany (Brakman et al., 2004) and Vietnam (Miguel and Roland 2005) – find few if any persistent impacts of the bombing on local population or economic performance. To the extent that war impacts are limited to the destruction of capital, these findings are consistent with the predictions of the neoclassical growth model, which predicts rapid catch-up growth postwar.

However, the neoclassical growth model has little to say about the impact of war on institutions, politics, and social norms, and it is plausible that effects along these dimensions could be more substantial and longer lasting than physical capital investment impacts. Historians have argued that wars can generate large impacts on both national and local institutions. Tilly (1975) finds that wars historically promoted state formation and nation building in Europe, ultimately strengthening institutional capacity and promoting economic development. Yet different types of conflicts could also have varying legacies. For instance, international wars against a common external foe plausibly lead to more positive institutional legacies than civil wars that heighten social divisions. A broader definition of institutions might include the social equilibrium reached by individual rational actors, including what some call social capital (Sobel, 2002). Alesina and LaFerrara (2002) find that Americans who had a traumatic experience – in their case, health problems, divorce, or financial troubles – in the previous year are much less likely to claim they “trust” others in surveys. In experimental economics evidence from Honduras, Castillo and Carter (2005) find that people in locales that experienced extensive destruction from Hurricane Mitch shared significantly more of the “pie” with their partner in a Dictator Game, suggesting that traumatic experiences could also have a positive impact on altruism or local cooperation norms.

At the individual level, the experience of being a victim of war violence could also profoundly change individual beliefs, values, and preferences. A psychological literature has documented some of these individual responses to conflict-related trauma. Studies often focus on the adverse legacies of post-traumatic stress syndrome (e.g. Dyregrov et al., 2002), but a subset of the literature now also explores positive responses to trauma, so-called post-traumatic growth theory (Tedeschi and Calhoun 1996; Powell et al., 2003), including changes in political action and beliefs. For example, Israelis who survived the Holocaust are more religious, more optimistic and at the same time have more extreme political views (Carmil and Breznitz, 1991), while Palestinians who personally survived aerial attacks are more likely to engage in political activism (Punamaki et al., 1997). Yet one key limitation of this literature is the use of small respondent samples of unknown representativeness. Experimental economics has produced evidence that individuals have a taste for punishing social norm violations, a dynamic likely to be relevant for civil war victims. This taste for punishing norm violators, which appears to have neural–physiological underpinnings (de Quervain et al., 2004), is consistent with preferences for equity (Fehr and Schmidt 1999) and could affect local collective action success by lowering the cost of sanctioning free riders.

Unfortunately, the extreme scarcity of micro survey data from contemporary conflict and post-conflict societies has limited research progress on these questions. One exceptional aspect of this project is the availability of high quality nationally representative household data from Sierra Leone containing detailed information on household experiences with war violence as well as on immediate postwar political and collective action behaviors, in addition to the more standard socioeconomic questions. The main empirical results focus on the individual-level analysis made possible by this unusual dataset. We also draw on other new Sierra Leone data to estimate relationships at the more aggregated chiefdom level.¹

In our main result, we find that individuals whose households directly experienced war violence are much more active political and civic participants than non-victims. War victims are significantly more likely to register to vote (by 2.6 percentage points), attend community meetings (by 6.5 percentage points), participate in local political and community groups, and contribute to local public goods (serving on a local primary school committee). Yet two or three years after the end of the war, there are – perhaps surprisingly – no lasting impacts on household socioeconomic status measures, including asset ownership, income earning activities, as well as consumption expenditures and child nutrition. This finding of no lingering socioeconomic impacts differs from Akresh et al., 2007, Blattman and Annan, 2007, both of whom find negative socioeconomic legacies of violent conflict in the Burundi and Uganda wars, respectively.

This suggests that the increased political mobilization is not due to socioeconomic differences, but rather reflects a direct relationship between victimization and postwar behaviors. In a related result, Blattman (2007) finds that former child soldiers in Uganda are significantly more likely to vote than other youth, and importantly shows that experiencing violence (but not perpetrating violence) increases voting among the former soldiers, which is consistent with our evidence on victimization. Earlier work using only a subset of the dataset assembled for this paper and using chiefdom-level variables finds broadly similar impacts on collective action outcomes (Bellows and Miguel 2006). The current paper's contribution over Bellows and Miguel (2006) lies in the use of individual-level data, a far broader range of outcome variables (from new datasets), and more extensive discussion of econometric estimation issues, implications of the findings, as well as the Sierra Leone context.

All of our regression specifications include enumeration area fixed effects. These fixed effects allow us isolate the variation in violence experienced across neighbors within the same village. Anecdotal evidence suggests that although some villages experienced more violent attacks than others, many rebel attacks were characterized by indiscriminant violence against individuals within villages. Yet even after including fixed effects, a key econometric issue remains in establishing a causal effect of victimization: the possibility that politically active individuals within a village were singled out for violence during the war. Such targeting could potentially generate spurious relationships due to omitted variable bias. We explore this possibility in two separate tests, and both tests indicate that systematic individual selection into victimization is unlikely to be driving our estimates. First, we show that our main finding – that victimized households are more politically active than non-victims – is statistically robust, and does not change in magnitude, in specifications with a rich set of household controls including prewar socioeconomic characteristics and community group leadership roles.

Second, and equally important, the estimates are undiminished among subsamples in which victimization is arguably more random than in the full sample: among youth (who were too young to have demonstrated prewar community leadership and thus less likely to be singled out) and among people living in areas with infrequent exposure to rebel groups, where rebel violence within villages was more likely to be indiscriminate.

Civil war experiences are transformative for many and our analysis suggests that one short-run legacy is increasing individual political participation, community activism, and local public good provision. As we discuss in the conclusion, this finding echoes the observations of other scholars of Sierra Leone and speaks to the remarkable resilience of ordinary Sierra Leoneans. More speculatively, this paper also contributes to the recent debate on the underlying causes of Africa's woeful recent economic performance, and speaks against claims that civil war's legacies are always major long-run impediments to African economic and political development. We speculate on how far the results may generalize in the conclusion.