Agricultural Roots of Social Conflict in Southeast Asia

Justin Hastings and David Ubilava

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: We examine whether harvest-time transitory shifts in employment and income lead to changes in political violence and social unrest in rice-producing croplands of Southeast Asia. Using monthly data from 2010 to 2023 on over 86,000 incidents covering 376 one-degree cells across eight Southeast Asian countries, we estimate a general increase in political violence and a decrease in social unrest in croplands with rice production during the harvest season relative to the rest of the crop year. In a finding that is least sensitive to alternative model specifications and data subsetting, we estimate a nine percent increase in violence against civilians in locations with considerable rice production compared to other parts of the region during the harvest season, relative to the rest of the year. We show that the harvest-time changes in conflict are most evident in rural cells with rainfed agriculture. Using location-specific annual variation in growing season rainfall, we then show that the harvest-time increase in violence against civilians occurs in presumably good harvest years, whereas increase in battles between actors of political violence follows growing seasons with scarce rainfall. The harvest-time decrease in social unrest, protests in particular, occurs after presumably bad harvest years. These findings contribute to research on the agroclimatic and economic roots of conflict and offer insights to policymakers by suggesting the spatiotemporal concentration of conflict as well as diverging effects by forms of conflict at harvest time in the rice-producing regions of Southeast Asia.

Date: 2023-04, Revised 2024-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-des, nep-dev and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.10027 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:arx:papers:2304.10027

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().