Understanding Conflict Incidence in Africa: The Role of Governance Institutions (1998–2016)

Abstract

The conflict propensity of African countries is said to have its roots in a wide set of political, social and economic issues that have been affecting severely the well-being of their populations (Ostby, Nordas & Rod, 2009; Fearon, 2010; Stewart, 2008). Over the last decades, following the relative deprivation focus first proposed by Davies (1962) and Gurr (1968), various studies (Fearon, 2010; Hegre & Nygard, 2015; Asongu & Kodila-Tedika, 2016) have attempted to find a causal link between governance and conflict measures since the importance of the former to explain similar countries’ differences in terms of conflict incidence has been lately recognized. In this vein, this paper’s contribution is twofold. First, it retrieves country-year conflict information from the Social Conflict Analysis Database (SCAD) and from the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) database elaborated by Kaufmann and Kraay (2019) from the World Bank in order to study the African case for the period 1998-2016. Second, it seeks to find the effect of good governance on both the number of conflicts and the number of deaths in conflicts. Three quantitative methods are employed: ordinary least squares regressions; panel data regressions – to control for unobservable factors invariant over time–, and – in order to allow the establishment of a causal link between the above-mentioned variables and to address endogeneity problems – an instrumental variables approach. Results show that governance quality has a negative and significant effect on conflict incidence – as Fearon (2010), Hegre & Nygard (2015) and Asongu & Kodila-Tedika (2016) found. Similar results – despite some particularities – are found when the analysis is performed considering different types of conflict and governance quality sub-components. Thereby, policy addressing the issue may not only take into account socio-economic problems but public institutions’ quality, as it is proved to be – both theoretically and empirically – essential to solve it.