Abstract
The possibility that climate change will increase the risk of civil war by causing agricultural decline, thereby increasing competition over scarce resources, is the focus of a vastly expanding research agenda. Yet, an emerging body of work suggests that agricultural abundance, not scarcity, drives violence. This study illustrates that debates over whether scarcity or abundance does more to drive violence can be adjudicated with greater attention to actor (government, rebel, or militia), violence, and crop types. It leverages new spatiotemporal monthly data to assess the relationship between local cash crop productivity and violence against civilians by state forces, rebels, and militias, accounting for the impact of climatic and socioeconomic indicators, across 14 countries in the Sahel between January 2006 and December 2018. Aggregating data on local agricultural production for 42 crops alongside a vegetation coverage indicator, a monthly measure of local cash crop productivity is created, and its impact on the monthly rates of violence against civilian by these three actors is estimated. Results indicate that rebel and militia attacks increase by about twofold in cash crop–producing locations during peak productivity months, whereas state force attacks do not. This suggests that nonstate actors are more dependent on local sources of revenue and follow demand-based incentives to use violence to facilitate appropriation.
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Data Availability
All replication data and scripts are available at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/LDI5TK.
Notes
Mali, Senegal, Mauritania, Niger, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Nigeria, Central African Republic, Chad, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Algeria, Sudan, and South Sudan.
For the specific crops grown in each location see Figure A1, supplementary material.
Data curation and replication files are available on Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/LDI5TK.
The models do not include an intercept due to the reliance on the method designed to facilitate estimation of models with fixed effects developed by Gaure (2013).
The coefficient and 95% confidence intervals decrease in size in these models due to the wider range on this anomaly-based variable (− 5.886 7.306) compared with the standard Crop productivityit indicator (0 1).
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Funding
Koren’s research was supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. SAP-2149053.
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The authors declare no conflict of interest. Justin Schon began employment at DHS after the data was collected and the original idea for the paper was conceived.
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Koren, O., Schon, J. Climate change, cash crops, and violence against civilians in the Sahel. Reg Environ Change 23, 112 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-023-02090-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-023-02090-7