Wartime Violence and Post-Conflict Political Mobilization in Mozambique

Mozambique’s post-conflict development has recently focused on the promise of biofuels production, and the Government of Mozambique has accordingly made hundreds of agricultural concessions to foreign and domestic corporations since 2006. In response, local groups have sought community land grants to protect livelihoods. We seek to understand whether the magnitude and recentness of violent events during Mozambique’s 16-year civil war determined the success of communities’ efforts to secure lands. We hypothesize that violence weakens the ability of communities to protect their traditional land uses from concessions by lobbying for community land grants. This hypothesis - dubbed the “weak institutions hypothesis” - is contrasted with the idea that violence galvanizes political participation. We test the hypothesis using GIS-generated data at the district level on recognized community landholdings and civil war events. Controlling for factors such as market access, road distance to grain warehouses, and spatial auto-correlation, we find that more intense violence is possibly (but not significantly) associated with more land grants, and that districts experiencing more recent violence are actually more likely to lobby successfully for land grants - lending support to the idea that violence boosts community use of riskpooling institutions.