Preparing for Genocide: Community Work in Rwanda

Evelina Bonnier (), Jonas Poulsen (), Thorsten Rogall () and Miri Stryjan
Additional contact information
Evelina Bonnier: Stockholm School of Economics
Jonas Poulsen: Department of Economics, Postal: Department of Economics, Uppsala University, P.O. Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden
Thorsten Rogall: IIES

No 2015:1, Working Paper Series from Uppsala University, Department of Economics

Abstract: How do political elites prepare the civilian population for participation in violent conflict? We empirically investigate this question using village-level data from the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. Every Saturday before 1994, Rwandan villagers had to meet to work on community infrastructure, a practice called Umuganda. This practice was highly politicized and, in the years before the genocide, regularly used for spreading political propaganda. To establish causality, we exploit cross-sectional variation in meeting intensity induced by exogenous weather fluctuations. We find that an additional rainy Saturday resulted in a five percent lower civilian participation rate in genocide violence. These results pass a number of indirect tests of the exclusion restriction as well as other robustness checks and placebo tests.

Keywords: Conflict; Rainfall (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 N47 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2015-01-19
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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