Essays on conflict and spatial inequality in the Sahel
(2024)
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- This dissertation draws from the Sahelian context and uses tools of spatial analysis to study the impacts and determinants of civil conflict, as well as historical roots of inequalities in human capital and development outcomes. The first chapter, Conflict, Route Insecurity and Migration in Mali, aims to examine how insecurity along main migration routes in Mali affects households’ ability to rely on migration as a risk-coping and income-smoothing strategy. Exploiting detailed data on the stock of economic migrants and the origin of remittances received from all nine regions of Mali, I first estimate the additional migration costs generated by insecurity with a gravity model. In a second step, I analyse the aggregate effect of average route insecurity faced by each of the locality on its migration market. The findings show that the stock of economic migrants is only weakly correlated with average route insecurity relevant to pre-conflict migration destinations, suggesting that reduction in accessibility of some destinations due to conflict is offset by migration to alternative destinations. New seasonal departures in migration instead are significantly affected by insecurity on migration routes. I find that the poorest households reduce their migration response to droughts as the average number of conflicts on migration routes increases, while the richest households reduce their mobility in response to route insecurity irrespective of climatic conditions. I show suggestive evidence that this reduced mobility of household members results in lower consumption per capita during the pre- harvest season, and increased risk of food insecurity in localities simultaneously affected by episodes of droughts during the past growing season. The second chapter, Cooperation between National Armies: Evidence from the Sahel borders, studies how military cooperation between national armies can contribute to the reduction of conflict intensity in porous border areas. In the context of the Sahel, we investigate how the creation of an international armed force that could operate across international borders (the G5-Sahel Joint Force) affected conflict dynamics. Relying on a regression discontinuity design, we find that the G5 mission lowered the intensity of conflict locally in its zone of operation, especially along border segments more porous due to their geographical features or ethnic composition. Further analysis of geographical conflict propagation patterns indicates that the G5-Sahel force facilitated security operations in border areas. The third chapter, Soldiers versus Laborers: Legacies of Colonial Military Service and Forced Labor in Mali, studies coercive military conscription and the associated forced labor regime instituted by the French colonial authorities in colonial Mali between 1927 and 1950. Due to endemic labor scarcity, the colonial authorities resorted to activating military reservists as forced laborers for public infrastructure construction. By digitizing more than 180,000 hand-written individual conscript files as well as colonial-time district conscription tables, we find that historically speaking, the activation of military forced labor was strongly correlated with local population density and specific demands of different public infrastructure projects in colonial Mali. To study the long-term effect of this coercive military recruitment, we exploit a colonial-time lottery system where conscripts were randomly assigned to regular army service versus the military reservist at the locality level. We employ a Difference-in-Differences empirical framework to analyze the differential effects of this lottery depending on district-level forced labor activation rates. We find that greater exposure to military service and forced labor has led to significantly worse human capital outcomes over the long run. This suggests a potential inter-generational transmission of rejection toward educational institutions associated with French colonialism.
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Richard, M. (2024). Essays on conflict and spatial inequality in the Sahel. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/217872