Quantifying the Disaggregated Impact of Atrocities on Socioeconomic Activity

Abstract

Abstract Our understanding of cruelty's impact on global human security and socioeconomic outcomes is still limited, especially with regard to how these effects unfold at the local, as opposed to the country, level. In this study, I first review literature on the impact of conflict, and violence against civilians specifically, on economic and political development globally, explicating potential adverse impacts, and highlighting the possibility of such violence increasing resilience in the long term. I then identify and discuss pathways linking political violence with lower socioeconomic activity locally. I hypothesize that violence disturbs socioeconomic activity in multiple ways, including by hurting businesses and laborers, scaring away tourists, and decreasing local investment, while additionally arguing that if no new atrocities happen, any impacts generated by these pathways will be relatively short term. Empirically, to operationalize local socioeconomic activity, I rely on nighttime light emissions; to operationalize atrocities, I rely on data from the Worldwide Atrocity Dataset, which measures all events that resulted with at least five civilian deaths by location. To test my expectations, I estimate both ordinary least squares and generalized methods of moments (GMM) models on a grid—(0.5 × 0.5-degree resolution) year level sample for the years 1997–2013. I find that, on average, an additional atrocity event corresponds to a decrease of 3–10 percent in local development levels the following year, compared with the baseline, but that such impacts disappear by the fourth year after the incident. Building on these findings, I discuss in detail research and policy implications.