Borderline Disorder: (De facto) Historical Ethnic Borders and Contemporary Conflict in Africa

Emilio Depetris-Chauvin and Ömer Özak

No 2105, Departmental Working Papers from Southern Methodist University, Department of Economics

Abstract: We explore the effect of historical ethnic borders on contemporary non-civil conflict in Africa. Exploiting variations across artificial regions (i.e., grids of 50x50km) within an ethnicity's historical homeland, we document that both the intensive and extensive margins of contemporary conflict are concentrated close to historical ethnic borders. Following a theory-based instrumental variable approach, which generates a plausibly exogenous ethno-spatial partition of Africa, we find that grid cells with historical ethnic borders have 27 percentage points higher probability of conflict and 7.9 percentage points higher probability of being the initial location of a conflict. We uncover several key underlying mechanisms: competition for agricultural land, population pressure, cultural similarity and weak property rights.

Keywords: Borders; Conflict; Intra-State Conflict; Ethnic Borders; Non-Civil Conflict; Ethnic Conflict; Territory; Property Rights; Landownership; Population Pressure; Migration; Historical Homelands; Development; Africa; Economic Development; Economic Growth; Voronoi Diagram; Voronoi Tesselation; Thiessen Tesselation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 N57 O13 O17 O43 P48 Q15 Q34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-evo, nep-gro, nep-his and nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ftp1.economics.smu.edu/WorkingPapers/2021/OZAK/OZAK-2021-11.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Borderline Disorder: (De facto) Historical Ethnic Borders and Contemporary Conflict in Africa (2021)
Working Paper: Borderline Disorder: (De facto) Historical Ethnic Borders and Contemporary Conflict in Africa (2020)
Working Paper: Borderline Disorder: (De Facto) Historical Ethnic Borders and Contemporary Conflict in Africa (2020)
Working Paper: Borderline Disorder: (De facto) Historical Ethnic Borders and Contemporary Conflict in Africa (2020)
Working Paper: Borderline Disorder: (De facto) Historical Ethnic Borders and Contemporary Conflict in Africa (2020)
Working Paper: Borderline Disorder: (De facto) Historical Ethnic Borders and Contemporary Conflict in Africa (2020)
Working Paper: Borderline Disorder: (De facto) Historical Ethnic Borders and Contemporary Conflict in Africa (2020)
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:smu:ecowpa:2105

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Departmental Working Papers from Southern Methodist University, Department of Economics Department of Economics, P.O. Box 750496, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX 75275-0496.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ömer Özak ().