State History and Contemporary Conflict: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

Emilio Depetris-Chauvin

No 475, Documentos de Trabajo from Instituto de Economia. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

Abstract: I examine empirically the role of historical political centralization on the likelihood of contemporary civil conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa. I combine a wide variety of historical sources to construct an original measure of long-run exposure to statehood at the sub-national level. I then exploit variation in this new measure along with geo-referenced conflict data to document a robust negative relationship between long-run exposure to statehood and contemporary conflict. From a variety of identification strategies, I provide evidence suggesting that the relationship is causal. I argue that regions with long histories of statehood are better equipped with mechanisms to establish and preserve order. I provide two pieces of evidence consistent with this hypothesis. First, regions with relatively long historical exposure to statehood are less prone to experience conflict when hit by a negative economic shock. Second, exploiting contemporary individual-level survey data, I show that within-country long historical statehood experience is linked to people’s positive attitudes toward state institutions and traditional leaders.

JEL-codes: D74 N47 O10 O17 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-evo and nep-his
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (33)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ioe:doctra:475

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