Ethnic Cleansing or Resource Struggle in Darfur? An empirical analysis

Ola Olsson and Eyerusalem Siba

No 417, Working Papers in Economics from University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics

Abstract: The con‡ict in Darfur has been described both as an ethnic cleansing campaign, carried out by the Sudanese government and its allied militias, and as a local struggle over dwindling natural resources between African farmers and Arab herders. In this paper, we construct a theoretical framework for understanding the choice between ethnic cleansing and resource capture and use a previously unexploited data set on 530 villages in Southwestern Darfur to analyze the determinants of attacks in the region. Our results clearly indicate that Janjaweed attacks have been targeted at villages dominated by the major rebel tribes, resulting in a massive displacement of those populations. Resource variables, capturing access to water and land quality, also have some explanatory power but are not consistently significant. These patterns suggest that attacks in the area had ethnic cleansing as a primary objective.

Keywords: Ethnic cleansing; resource struggle; Darfur (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O41 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2009-12-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-dev and nep-res
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/2077/21525 (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: Ethnic cleansing or resource struggle in Darfur? An empirical analysis (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:gunwpe:0417

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers in Economics from University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Box 640, SE 405 30 GÖTEBORG, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jessica Oscarsson ().