Follow-up to typologies of political dispute
March 30th, 2012 § 2 Comments
I got some great responses to my last post about typologies of political dispute, which I’ll list and respond to in turn. On the whole, I’m not sure this typology idea is leading anywhere useful, but there’s definitely a lot to learn from the comments I’ve received.
- Jay Ufelder points out that the post makes it sound like these disputes are static, whilst they’re actually dynamic and interactive (with which I completely agree!). He suggested reading Patrick Regan & Daniel Norton’s 2005 paper “Greed, Grievance, and Mobilization in Civil Wars” [PDF].*
- Daniel Solomon asks about what differentiates “violent protest” from rebellion, as he considers these similar categories, whilst Zach Warner does see them to be different. In his opinion, rebellion aims at changing the social basis of political power, whilst violent protests represents dissatisfaction with the outcome of current political structures.
- Dan and Zach also point out that the empty boxes in the dispute matrix could be attributable to mixed strategies of repression, as dispute may provoke both military campaigns and violent repression of civilian voices.
- Rebecca Weissburg suggested checking out Nic Cheeseman‘s work, and Dan suggested Alex de Waal’s recent essay on ending mass atrocities. Dan has used both Cheeseman & de Waal’s work in his own article on participatory violence and local peacebuilding in Kenya.
I’m totally with Jay on the interactive nature of political dispute, and I don’t think I made that point clearly enough in the last post. I was thinking of the 3-by-3 matrix more as a set of outcomes on a decision tree than as a way to simply categorize different types of conflict. Mostly I was wondering if this would be a useful way of thinking about A) why similar initial political conditions and grievances produce different types of disputes, as you move along a decision tree, and B) how disputes shift between categories as both civilian & government actors change their strategies. Of course, as Dan and Zach correctly point out, the shortcoming of the decision tree model is that it doesn’t do well at capturing instances when many types of disputes are operating simultaneously – say, peaceful protests in a capital coupled with armed rebellion in an outlying district.
Dan is quite right to point out that I didn’t define the distinction between violent protest and armed rebellion clearly. The distinction I generally had in mind was of peaceful/violent civilian protest - that is to say, (semi-)organized civilian movements – as compared to the decision to form rebel militias and launch an armed rebellion. Of course, actors with different grievances/motivations/capabilities within a given country could well engaged in different strategies simultaneously – and I’m starting to wonder how often the same actors actually transition from one type of protest to another. Do protesting civilians often go off to create or join militias? And conceptualizing “protest” as a civilian activity seems to imply that militaries can only ever engage in rebellion or coups when they’re politically dissatisfied, which isn’t true. This is why I don’t think this framework holds up, in the end – there’s too much of a conceptual muddle about these different categories of dispute, and I don’t feel like I have enough information to clean it up. But I’m glad the conversation happened!
*I’m including the PDF instead of a link to the journal article to facilitate access for readers who aren’t affiliated with universities and thus don’t have subscriptions to many journals. I think this will be standard policy around here from now on. Gated articles might be good for journals’ financial health, and that’s not a negligible consideration, but it’s definitely bad for intellectual debate.
Typologies of political dispute
March 20th, 2012 § 4 Comments
Here’s an idea I’ve been brainstorming recently, and which I’m tossing in a rather raw form out into the world: has anyone written the definitive typology of different types of political disputes? Not that I plan to write it; I’d just like to know if it’s out there!
Consider the ways in which citizens may express opposition to government policy. This could run the spectrum from peaceful protest to violent rebellion on the civilian disputant side, and from active accommodation to a violent military campaign on the state side. Naturally, such disputes are relational and contingent – the actions taken by either party provoke a reaction of some type by the other party, which itself will condition future actions by the first party.
I was thinking of this because most of the work I’ve seen on African politics in the 1990s seems to focus rather narrowly on either pro-democratic protest or civil war, without considering them as examples of political dispute on different ends of the same spectrum. Some of this literature is discussed in my recent post on Robert Bates’ latest book. As I noted in that post, the same combination of factors (economic stagnation + political unrest) led to fairly peaceful democratic change in some countries and civil war in others.
I’m not asking here about why some countries consolidated democracy and others reverted to authoritarianism or fell into conflict; the income hypothesis seems to predict democratic consolidation pretty well. And I’m not asking about why some countries had civil wars at all and others didn’t; there’s a lot of work out there on the structural determinants of civil war, notably Collier & Hoeffler. But I do think it’s interesting that, facing similar sets of political disputes around the same time (the 1980s and early 1990s), some countries followed contingent paths that led to relatively peaceful political change, whilst others drifted towards the use of violence.
As a first take at an organizing structure for this thought, here’s a graph representing the spectrum of citizen & government positions during a political dispute. (Click to enlarge it.) It clearly still needs some work. Does anyone find this useful? Am I just replicating someone else’s work without knowing it? (It looks like Regina Bateson at Yale has a working paper addressing a similar topic, and there’s definitely Rebel Rulers, but I haven’t seen much else about the relational, contingent nature of political conflict.) Would love to hear your thoughts, oh readers!
Conflict minerals and Kony2012
March 14th, 2012 § 6 Comments
Everyone who cares about African development has surely heard both sides of the Kony2012 debate by now, and frankly the sight of another #stopkony hashtag is enough to make me close my browser tab at this point. Thus, this is not a post about Kony2012! It is, however, a post about an analogous phenomenon: the way in which the Enough Project used an oversimplified and inaccurate narrative about the conflict in eastern Congo to “raise awareness” in the West, and translated that awareness into harmful policy on the ground. Laura Seay recently wrote an excellent report [PDF] on this topic for the Center for Global Development. It’s a timely reminder that this type of poorly informed Western activism can have very real consequences for ordinary Africans.
The central problem with Enough’s narrative about conflict minerals is this: whilst rebel groups in the eastern DRC were profiting from mineral sales prior to the September 2010 ban on exports, minerals certainly weren’t causing the ongoing conflict, and they weren’t the rebels’ only source of funding. Cutting off one source of funds has done nothing to resolve many rebels’ underlying grievances about land use and citizenship, or to fill in the great vacuum of state authority in the Kivus which is so conducive to armed violence. Furthermore, most rebel groups have access to funds from other activities, including logging, agriculture, and informal taxation of local populations. (If anything, they’ve probably increased their levels of extortion from Congolese citizens since the mineral export ban in an effort to compensate for revenue shortfalls.) Whilst mineral exports were one of the factors perpetuating the conflict, the belief that they were its linchpin is clearly inaccurate. Effectively banning mineral purchases from the DRC has thrown hundreds of thousands of miners out of work, with few prospects for alternative employment, for the sake of a policy that has done little to reduce levels of violence in the region.
Interestingly, mineral exports may have actually facilitated the event that did significantly reduce the frequency of violence in the Kivus: the January 2009 arrest of Laurent Nkunda, leader of the CNDP militia and a key political actor driving the conflict in eastern DRC. Laura notes that President Kabila’s seemingly inexplicable decision to ban mineral exports (an activity from which many top Congolese politicians profit) ahead of the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act was likely driven by two factors: a desire to convince eastern voters that he was paying attention to the region’s problems, and an interest in consolidating FARDC control over mines to ensure Rwanda’s continued access to minerals. This latter consideration appears to be a key element maintaining the continued cooperation between the DRC and Rwanda. This same detente, of course, led to Nkunda’s arrest.
Laura also makes several other points about the political economy of Congolese mineral exports which I hadn’t heard before.
- The much-cited figure about how the DRC has 80% of the world’s coltan supplies is likely inaccurate; the real statistic is probably less than 10%. However, mining revenues (from all minerals) still play an outsize role in the country’s economic life. They “[account] for 80% of the exports, 72% of the national budget and 28% of GDP according to the latest available statistics.”
- “If minerals cause or drive conflict in a failed state, then we would expect to see most, if not all, of the Congolese mineral trade to be militarized and/or the object of competition between armed groups. This is far from true, however. The mines of Kasai and central Katanga are completely free of violence, as are many mines in the heart of the conflict regions in North and South Kivu and Ituri.”
It’s a report that’s well worth reading, for a contextualized take on the conflict minerals narrative as well as a pointed reminder of the dangers of misguided Western activism.
Book review: When Things Fell Apart
February 22nd, 2012 § 3 Comments
I went into Robert Bates’ recent book When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late-Century Africa with high expectations. His 1982 work Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policies remains one of the best pieces of African political analysis I’ve ever read, displaying an admirable willingness to take African domestic politics seriously, and thereby producing a insightful overview at the process of agricultural policy-making. (I must confess here that I thought this sounded like a resoundingly dull topic until I read the book, at which point I realized that Bates had captured many of the fundamental dynamics of African politics in the post-colonial era.) At any rate, I fully expected the same insight from When Things Fell Apart – and was disappointed to put it down feeling like I had learned little of value. The book is a decent primer on African politics in the 1980s and 1990s for the reader who’s unfamiliar with the topic, but it doesn’t even define “state failure” clearly, let alone provide an adequate metric for determining why some African states failed and others didn’t. One could be excused for coming away with the conclusion that the entire continent imploded in the 1990s. Such an important topic deserves a more clearly-written book (as other reviewers seem to agree).
A bit of background: my primer on African politics in the 1980s and 1990s was Michael Bratton & Nicholas van der Walle’s 1997 book Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective (which I read for a course with the excellent Peter Lewis). Democratic Experiments isn’t what I’d call compulsively readable, but it does draw a clear picture of the generalized path that many African countries followed from authoritarianism to democratization. Generally speaking, the profound economic crisis of the 1980s unsettled many African autocrats’ grips on power, and by the end of the decade protests over economic stagnation and single-party rule were common. Many leaders reluctantly switched to multiparty democracy under such pressure, whilst others were able to repress domestic dissent but were still pushed towards democracy by international donors. Of course, some states avoided democratization entirely, as in Sudan with its civil war, Somalia with its total collapse, and Zaire with Mobutu’s preternatural skill at clinging to power.
So, in short: prolonged economic stagnation weakens leaders’ holds on power and provokes political unrest, which might lead to democracy (Ghana), civil war (Somalia), or both in succession (Rwanda & Burundi). I was really hoping that Bates’ book would start from this point and investigate the determinants of why some nations collapsed and others weathered this period intact. Instead, Bates takes the same stylized elements as Bratton & van der Walle (economic crisis + resultant instability in the political system), adds a structural assumption about politicians’ heightened discount rates in times of crisis, and comes up with a recipe for violent political infighting over access to resources and resultant state collapse. This is the flip side of the processes of democratization explored in Democratic Experiments, and it’s a plausible analysis for many of the states that did in fact fall into civil conflict.
However, Bates never actually defines “state failure,” nor identifies the set of African states or even the specific time periods to which this analysis applies. His working definition appears to mean “civil war during the 1990s,” based on statements like the opening sentence of his conclusion, which discusses Liberia and Somalia. It’s an odd oversight for a political scientist, given that the Liberian civil war is arguably a different type of “state failure” than the complete collapse of the central government in Somalia. (Rwanda and the DRC are also great examples: both were sites of great violence in the 1990s, but today Rwanda has one of the strongest governments in Africa, whilst the Congolese government doesn’t even control all of its own territory.) For that matter, evidence for the book’s arguments is culled from across the continent, including anecdotes from states such as Ghana and Zambia (which have never had civil wars) alongside the obvious choices of war-torn Burundi and DRC. Bates’ reasonable analysis of the risk factors for state collapse is greatly weakened by this inability to apply his hypotheses to specific African states.
Like this:
Violence and agency in the DRC
February 16th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
In yet another bit of backdated conference blogging, the Great Lakes Policy Forum held an excellent session on “Telling the Story of the Congo” last October. (Notes aren’t up at their site, but Wronging Rights lived-blogged the session.) The first day of the two-day event (which was all I was able to attend) focused on the partial and often inaccurate narrative about the conflict in eastern Congo which has gained currency among policymakers in the West. One of the first speakers opened with a striking exercise: he pulled a map of the DRC up on the overhead and pointed to a variety of cities throughout the country, asking the audience how many people had visited each. A healthy number had visited Kinshasa, and nearly as many had been to Goma or Bukavu, but very few had been to Lubumbashi or Kisangani, let alone Mbuji-Mayi or Mbandaka. This is a very real result of the way in which our collective imagined geography of the DRC has shrunk to the extreme west (Kinshasa) and extreme east of the country, rendering the rest of the country not as no-man’s land, but as non-existent land.
As the same speaker noted, the current Western framing of the DRC as a land torn by sexual violence and mineral-fueled conflict tends to pass over questions of domestic politics and governance, stripping the Congolese of political agency within their own country. By way of example, he noted that a recent case of rape in North Kivu drew criticism of MONUSCO for their failure to prevent it; however, few commentators asked who committed the rapes, or where the army or police were at the time. Sexual violence is clearly a symptom of the eastern DRC’s broader security problems, but the international community appears more interested in topical solutions aimed at reducing rape rates than in sustained engagement with the larger issue of security sector reform.
Several speakers were similarly critical of the Western narrative around minerals and conflict. One pointed out that mining is in fact not the only revenue source for many armed groups, and that it’s unclear whether cutting off this particular source of funding would decrease or exacerbate violence. Another speaker, more accepting of the idea of a positive correlation between mining revenues and violence, said that the international community’s exclusive focus on eastern Congo overlooked continued conflicts over natural resources in the center of the country. In his words, places like Kikwete and Mbuji-Mayi are “more like war zones” today than Goma is. Ultimately, the canonical view of conflict minerals in the eastern DRC appears to have been created largely by Western activist groups such as the Enough Project, with very little input from the Congolese, and without sufficient attention to the contextualized and ultimately local ways in which violence plays out.
Straus on remaking Rwanda
January 25th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Catching up on yet another batch of backdated conference blogging, I went to see Scott Straus discuss his edited volume Remaking Rwanda at CSIS last October. It’s a thought-provoking book, as is his previous work, The Order of Genocide, which contains a very insightful analysis of the microdynamics of the genocide. Remaking offers a largely critical look at Rwanda’s post-genocide domestic politics, with only brief acknowledgement of the RPF’s real successes in realms such as primary education and economic growth before proceeding to pillory the government for its repression of political dissent and attempts at social engineering.
Rather than revisiting the book’s conclusions directly, Straus used the conference to engage with the question of why the Western meta-narrative about Rwanda had shifted from a largely positive one in the early post-genocide period to the flurry of critiques that constitute it today. In part, he felt that the shift was warranted. Rwanda’s obvious intervention in the DRC contributed to an early change in public opinion, supported by the increasing number of defections from the RPF and the repressive manner in which the 2010 elections were handled. The 2009 death of Alison des Forges, who was an early critic of the RPF’s slide towards authoritarianism, then spurred the generation of a number of commemorative conferences and works on Rwanda at a time when scholars were abandoning the self-censorship that had previously characterized much writing on the country. Remaking Rwanda was one such work.
That said, Straus also acknowledged the complexity of Rwanda’s contemporary politics. Whilst “it’s not a secret” that the RPF has installed an authoritarian regime, he also noted the challenges of governing a post-conflict country, and suggested that we are in need of better methods to evaluate the effects of authoritarianism in different contexts. In part, he seemed to feel that this pointed to a need for more comparative work on Rwanda, and explicitly called for more comparisons with Burundi. Of course, as another commentator pointed out, there’s an even larger set of potential comparative partners out there, since practically every leader in East Africa today came to power out of conflict.
Having had a few months to think this through, it does seem to me that much research on Rwanda is limited by a lack of comparison. I do think there are good reasons to believe that genocide is a form of violence that’s analytically distinct from other types of civil conflict, but it also seems that some perspective is lost in treating Rwanda as completely unique. Regression to authoritarianism (or illiberal democracy, or some other non-democratic form of rule) was common in the 1990s even among African states that hadn’t suffered conflict. Straus’ more specific concern is that repression and “growing de facto ethnic inequality” will someday re-ignite all the familiar conflicts, which seems a likely outcome to me – one certainly sees the same pattern in both Rwanda and Burundi’s historical periods of ethnic conflict. That said, one might gain a better understanding of the specific conditions that contribute to the re-ignition of conflict, or to its avoidance, in comparative perspective. Uganda and Ethiopia might both be interesting places to start.
Recommended reading on ethnicity in Rwanda & Burundi?
September 29th, 2011 § 14 Comments
As mentioned in a previous post, I’m currently working on an MA thesis about post-conflict governance in Rwanda and Burundi. Specifically, I’m interested in the ways in which popular ethnic reconciliation has occurred (or not occurred) in both countries. There’s a decent amount of scholarly attention paid to Rwanda’s official denial of ethnicity and this policy’s detrimental effects upon popular reconciliation, but when discussion of Burundi occurs, it’s usually limited to the observation that consociationalism seems to have been efficacious in reducing ethnic tensions. I haven’t found much research into the mechanisms by which Burundi’s reconciliation has occurred, which strikes me as a very interesting question. Since I can’t pop over to Burundi for fieldwork between now and December, I’m mostly planning to review the extant literature on this question and highlight areas for future research.
My current reading list is below; any additional suggestions or comments would be most welcome! (I have more literature sitting unsorted on my hard drive, but this is what I successfully glanced through before my prospectus was due this week.)
Burundi
- Daley, “Ethnicity and Political Violence in Africa: The Challenge to the Burundi State,” 2006
- HRW, “Closing Doors? The Narrowing of Democratic Space in Burundi,” 2010
- ICG, “Burundi: Democracy and Peace at Risk,” 2006
- Laely, “Peasants, Local Communities, and Central Power in Burundi,” 1997
- Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide, 1996
- Levy, “The Road Ahead: Citizen Attitudes about Burundi in the Post-2010 Election Period,” 2011
- Peterson, “A Beacon for Central Africa,” 2006
- Reyntjens, “Burundi: A Peaceful Transition After a Decade of War?”, 2005
- Southall & Bentley, An African Peace Process: Mandela, South Africa, and Burundi, 2005
- Uvin, Life After Violence: A People’s History of Burundi, 2008
- Vandeginste, “Power-Sharing as a Fragile Safety Valve in Times of Electoral Turmoil: The Costs and Benefits of Burundi’s 2010 Elections,” 2011
- Vandeginste, “Power-Sharing, Conflict and Transition in Burundi: Twenty Years of Trial and Error,” 2009
- Watt, Burundi: Biography of a Small African Country, 2008
Rwanda
- Amnesty International, “Safer to Stay Silent: The Chilling Effect of Rwanda’s Laws on ‘Genocide Ideology’ and ‘Sectarianism,’” 2010
- Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, 1999
- Hatzfeld, Machete Season (2005), Into the Quick of Life (2005), The Antelope’s Strategy (2009)
- Hintjens, “Post-Genocide Identity Politics in Rwanda,” 2008
- HRW, “Justice Compromised: The Legacy of Rwanda’s Community-Based Gacaca Courts,” 2011.
- Ingelaere, “Living the Transition: A Bottom-Up Perspective on Rwanda’s Political Transition,” 2007
- Lemarchand, “Genocide, Memory, and Ethnic Reconciliation in Rwanda,” 2007
- Marysse & Reyntjens, The Political Economy of the Great Lakes Region, 2005
- Mgbako, “Ingando Solidarity Camps: Reconciliation and Political Indoctrination in Post-Genocide Rwanda,” 2005
- Pottier, Re-Imagining Rwanda, 2002
- Morrill, “Reconciliation and the Gacaca: The Perceptions and Peace-Building Potential of Rwandan Youth Detainees,” 2004
- Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis (1997), Africa’s World War (2008)
- Purdekova, “Building a Nation in Rwanda? De-Ethnicisation and its Discontents,” 2008
- Rettig, “Gacaca: Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation in Postconflict Rwanda,” 2008
- Straus, The Order of Genocide (2007), Remaking Rwanda (2011)
Rwanda & Burundi
- Lemarchand, “Consociationalism and Power Sharing in Africa: Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo,” 2006
- Lemarchand, Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa, 2008
- Schrami, “Ethnicised Politics: Patterns of Interpretation of Rwandans and Burundians,” 2010
Ethnicity
- Eller, From Culture to Ethnicity to Conflict, 1999
- Saha, Ethnicity and Sociopolitical Change in Africa (2008), Perspectives on Contemporary Ethnic Conflict (2006)
- Wimmer et al., Facing Ethnic Conflicts, 2004
Alarming sentences
September 26th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
From Stef Vandeginste, “Power-Sharing as a Fragile Safety Valve in Times of Electoral Turmoil: The Costs and Benefits of Burundi’s 2010 Elections” [PDF]:
Burundi’s experience seems to contradict the classical criticism that consociational power-sharing “freezes” people’s identities and therefore deepens the segmental cleavages and divisions… Instead, the acknowledgement and institutionalisation of the segments’ political relevance may be seen as a first and necessary (though by no means final) step in the process of de-ethnicising political competition and of overcoming decades of politico-ethnic violence. (In which case neighbouring Rwanda still needs to embark on its own consociational journey, presumably after a next round of politico-ethnic violence). (p. 82, emphasis added)
Not that I don’t also think this is likely. But it’s a bit chilling to hear the prospect of additional violence in Rwanda discussed so casually.
Grievance, rainfall, & migration in Burundi
September 18th, 2011 § 1 Comment
Currently reading an interesting paper by Eleanora Nillesen & Philip Verwimp on whether agricultural shocks (namely rainfall shocks) increased people’s likelihood to actively participate in Burundi’s civil war. They find that, whilst negative shocks to the price of coffee (the country’s principle cash crop) didn’t increase rebel recruitment, drought shocks were positively correlated with recruitment, perhaps underlining the greater role of agriculture in helping households manage risk – it could be a greater blow to lose consumption crops than to receive a lower yearly payment for a cash crop. (It was especially interesting to read this in light of Heather Sarsons’ recent work [PDF] questioning the use of rainfall as an instrument for wages from agricultural labor, based on new data from India. She suggests that, unsurprisingly, rainfall may affect people’s participation in political protests through channels other than the creation of grievance & reduced opportunity cost of involvement. Since N&V weren’t using rainfall as an instrument, this critique doesn’t directly apply to their work, but it’s still useful to think through the multiplicity of ways in which rainfall affects people’s lives in developing countries.)
N&V also included a small methodological note which I found especially telling in re: the social importance of land in Burundi. The sample for the data underlying this paper was drawn from households who completed the 1998 Burundi Priority Survey, which was a joint project of the Burundi Institute of Statistics & Economic Studies and the World Bank. Interestingly, despite the fact that N&V collected a second round of data in 2007, after multiple years of war, they noted only 13% attrition from their original sample. As they write, “In Burundi the pressure [on] land is extraordinary high… As a result people may have only have fled [from the conflict] at the very last minute, if there was no other option, and return[ed] immediately after the violence…to ensure their claim to land. Most often, our survey team would find the households in the same location as in 1998″ (p. 6). Pretty remarkable.
War, growth, and political activism in Africa
July 6th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Following up on my previous post about Chris Blattman’s work with ex-combatants in Northern Uganda, I came across another interesting piece [PDF] by him and a earlier article [PDF] by John Bellows and Edward Miguel about the effects of war on post-conflict political participation. Bellows & Miguel’s 2006 piece captures a variety of interesting findings about the medium-term effects of conflict on both consumption and local institutions in Sierra Leone. Using data from 2005, three years after the end of the 1991-2002 civil war, they find that areas experiencing greater amounts of violence during the war did not have lower consumption levels than less-affected areas by 2004. Whilst this result is consistent with the neoclassical assumption that destruction of capital may lead to faster growth converging back to steady state growth, they also supply helpfully specific hypotheses for this return to growth, including the continuing availability of diamond wealth in some of the regions which experienced the highest levels of conflict, the reconstruction work of NGOs, and the fact that soil was allowed to lie fallow in many areas during the war.
More interestingly, however, Bellows & Miguel also find that areas with greater levels of war-related victimization (and not simply greater numbers of battles) have higher attendance at community meetings and higher levels of voter registration in the post-conflict period. These results hold after controlling for the number of NGOs doing reconstruction work in these regions. Contrary to the popular expectation that war destroys the social fabric, these results indicate that in some cases, conflict may actually increase local-level political activism.
In a 2007 publication, Blattman uses his unique dataset from northern Uganda to investigate political activism among returning combatants in the post-conflict period, and finds a similar result: youth who were abducted by the LRA are more likely than non-abducted youth to become community leaders and to vote on national referenda. He suggests that the act of witnessing violence may be the primary motivator behind this increasing political activity, as witnessing violence was significantly correlated with greater political involvement in ways that perpetrating or receiving violence, or carrying weapons, were not. What’s best about this piece, however (and at least from the standpoint of mainstream development economics), is its inclusion of qualitative data. A number of former abductees described their abductions as experiences that left them more mature and worldly, less willing to uncritically accept the political positions of local leaders, and increasingly interested in making something of their lives. This obviously applied to a minority of abductees overall, just as political leadership is inherently a minority trait in any population, but still offers a fascinating bit of insight into a little-discussed aspect of post-conflict reintegration.
