IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cer/papers/wp512.html

Trusting Former Rebels: An Experimental Approach to Understanding Reintegration after Civil War

Author

Listed:
  • Michal Bauer
  • Nathan Fiala
  • Ian Levely

Abstract

The stability of many post-conflict societies rests on the successful reintegration of former soldiers. We use an experimental approach to study reintegration in Northern Uganda and examine behavior of former soldiers together with the behavior of receiving communities towards this group. We focus on trust-based interactions and find that individual trustworthiness increases with the length of time a person was with the Lord's Resistance Army, a rebel group which forcibly recruited a large fraction of young people in the area. The effect is strongest among former soldiers who were abducted during childhood and is mute among those who soldiered during adulthood. These results are consistent with predictions of recent theories that highlight the importance of cooperation during war. Furthermore, members of receiving communities with an abductee son, who thus have better knowledge of former soldiers are aware of the behavioral difference. They believe former soldiers are more trustworthy than their peers and trust them more. Last, we find no evidence of preference-based discrimination, suggesting that anger is attenuated when communities do not attribute responsibility for committed violence to returning soldiers.

Suggested Citation

  • Michal Bauer & Nathan Fiala & Ian Levely, 2014. "Trusting Former Rebels: An Experimental Approach to Understanding Reintegration after Civil War," CERGE-EI Working Papers wp512, The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague.
    • Handle: RePEc:cer:papers:wp512
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.cerge-ei.cz/pdf/wp/Wp512.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • C93 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Field Experiments
    • D03 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Behavioral Microeconomics: Underlying Principles
    • D74 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Conflict; Conflict Resolution; Alliances; Revolutions
    • O12 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cer:papers:wp512. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lucie Vasiljevova (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/eiacacz.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.