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.
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.
Ugandan media thought of the day
June 24th, 2011 § 2 Comments
More belated conference blogging, but Maria Burnett of Human Rights Watch offered up an interesting observation about the Ugandan media at a recent OSI event on Museveni’s increasingly undemocratic rule. As she noted, the degree of press freedom allowed to English-language media is often favorably commented upon – but newspapers and radio broadcasts in local languages are significantly more constrained, and this has largely escaped scrutiny by the international community. This is really a clever way of controlling information flow to ordinary citizens whilst still maintaining the appearance of openness. I’d be interested to hear any thoughts readers might have on this observation.
I took this photo in Kampala in early 2009 precisely because I was struck by the diversity of Uganda’s print journalism in comparison to Rwanda’s tightly controlled media. It’s a shame to hear that this openness isn’t as thoroughgoing as it appeared.
The postbellum lives of child soldiers
March 23rd, 2011 § 1 Comment
Chris Blattman’s fame as a development blogger is such that I think the rest of us development-types sometimes give short shrift to his published research. Thus it was with interest that I read his 2008 article on “Child combatants in northern Uganda: Reintegration myths and realities” (PDF) co-authored with Jeannie Annan. B&A identify a rather surprising natural experiment, arguing that LRA abduction of young men was so widespread as to be essentially random. This allows them to make relatively clean estimates of the impact of child soldiering on comparable groups of young Ugandan men, using a mixed-methods approach with approximately 1000 respondents.
What they find is more complex, and perhaps less dramatic, than many mainstream accounts of child soldiering suggest. Children were most likely to be abducted in early adolescence, as younger boys were inefficient fighters and older boys were more difficult to indoctrinate & posed greater escape risks. 80% of abductees eventually escaped, with most of the remaining 20% presumed dead.
Upon returning home, however, the former abductees were generally not received as the “damaged, uneducated pariahs” that the NYT had assumed them to be (quoted in B&A, p. 1). 94% of interviewed abductees said that their families had accepted them back without censure, and three quarters reported that they were generally treated well by their communities. Only one sixth of former child soldiers reported elevated levels of psychological distress, and on average they were no more likely to behave violently than non-abductees.
Unfortunately, the economic outlook for returned child soldiers was not quite as bright. B&A note that, whilst the average abductee only missed 9 months of education, abduction in early adolescence meant that that missing year of schooling was generally the 6th or 7th grade, when Ugandan students typically learn to read and write. Thus former abductees were “twice as likely to be illiterate” (p. 16) The educational gap also explained nearly two-thirds of the observed earnings shortfall of child soldiers, which found them “half as likely to be engaged in skill- or capita-intensive employment, and [to] have a third lower daily earnings” (p. 16) than non-abducted young men. Interestingly, shortfalls have also been found found in the earnings of American veterans of the Vietnam War. In both cases, “the source of this earnings gap appears to be time away from civilian education and work experience” (p. 22). The authors close with a set of useful recommendations for tailoring ex-combatant reintegration programs to these realities.
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Six months
December 29th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
I left Ghana six months ago today, and I must admit that it still feels odd to be back. As Glenna Gordon aptly wrote about her return to New York a few months ago,
That time I was standing on a table in the middle of a tshirt factory when the owner walked in, I didn’t think, how did I get here? Or stranded on the side of the road somewhere between Sierra Leone and Liberia when the bush taxi broke down and we all sat on logs waiting for another car to come by and shepherd us to the next town, I didn’t think, how did I get here? … I know how I got to those places. The question is just how I got back.
Waking up in my own apartment, with running water and central air and electricity to keep the fridge going, still feels stranger to me than piling into a matatu in Kigali with twenty other people and a few chickens. Stranger than walking back to Walewale after a day surveying in rural villages, using the Tigo cell tower next to my office to navigate my way through dusty fields. Not quite as strange as the double economy in Kinshasa, where one could pay US$8 for mangoes imported from Belgium at City Market or 20 cents for local mangoes at the bus stop – but still. The thought of six months passing since last I stood in Ghana is unreal.
It is in memory of this that I’ve been flipping through all of my Africa photos again, and thought I’d post a few favorites from countries beyond the usual suspects:
A tree grows in Kampala
Mosaic from a monument at Place de la Revolution, Bujumbura
Drinking local in Addis
