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Land-Use Change and Communal Conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa

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Published/Copyright: September 26, 2017
Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy
From the journal Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy Volume 23 Issue 4

Abstract

This paper addresses the correlation between land-use changes and communal conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, by articulating the analysis on a 0.5° × 0.5° regular grid, we estimate the probability of a communal conflict event at time t in any given cell i as a function of a set of variables for land-use variations, a spatial and a temporal lag of the dependent variable, a series of climate attributes and time-invariant geo-physical attributes (all measured at cell level), and a set of institutional attributes (measured at country level). The results show that a positive variation in land-use for agricultural and urban purposes significantly increases both the probability and the number of communal conflicts. On the contrary, the impact of increasing pasture land is not so clear, since results supporting the evidence of a negative relation between pasture use and communal conflicts risk are not robust to different model specifications.

Keywords: communal conflict; land-use change; spatial disaggregated analysis; Sub-Saharan Africa
JEL Classification: O13; O18; Q01; R14

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Published Online: 2017-9-26

©2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/peps-2017-0032
Keywords for this article
communal conflict; land-use change; spatial disaggregated analysis; Sub-Saharan Africa

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Introduction to the Proceedings of the 17th Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science Conference
  2. On the Proper Use of Game-Theoretic Models in Conflict Studies
  3. Ornithology and Varieties of Conflict: A Personal Retrospective on Conflict Forecasting
  4. Conflict Fragmentation Index
  5. Income and Armed Civil Conflict: An Instrumental Variables Approach
  6. Land-Use Change and Communal Conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa
  7. Bridging Economics and International Relations to Understand State Capacity and War in Sub-Saharan Africa
  8. Political Regimes and Government’s Reaction to Terrorism. A Simple Model
  9. A Perfect Match? Are Dogmatic Belief Systems Simply a Reconciliation of Cognitive and Emotional Human Needs?
  10. Urban Protests, Coups d’état and Post-Coup Regime Change
  11. Nonviolent Resistance and Peaceful Turnover of Power
  12. Political Cycles in Military Deployment
  13. Buying Friends? The Importance of Economic Flows in Assembling the Iraq War Coalition
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