Communal violence in the Horn of Africa following the 1998 El Niño

Stijn van Weezel

No 241 updated, HiCN Working Papers from Households in Conflict Network

Abstract: This study exploits a shift in Spring precipitation patterns in the Horn of Africa following the 1998 El Niño to examine the effect of climate change on conflict. Using data for Ethiopia and Kenya and focusing on communal conflict the regression analysis links districts that have experienced drier conditions since 1999 relative to 1981-1998 with higher conflict levels. This result is robust to different model specifications and changing outcome variable but does not generalise well to out-of-sample data. The cross-validation illustrates that the model linking droughts with conflict has a relatively poor predictive performance. The results also show that districts with substantial shares of pastoralism experience higher levels of communal violence, something that is well documented in the qualitative literature, but don’t face higher risks following decreases in precipitation levels.

Keywords: Horn of Africa; climate change; rainfall; communal violence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2017-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.hicn.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/HiCN-WP-241-updated.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Communal violence in the Horn of Africa following the 1998 El Niño (2016)
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:hic:wpaper:241

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HiCN Working Papers from Households in Conflict Network
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tilman Brück () and () and () and ().