Unemployment doesn’t cause conflict

In Collier’s later papers on post-conflict reconstruction, he argues that the economic growth rate is the single most (statistically) influential variable in determining whether a country returns to war within a few years of a peace settlement. Employment, he says, is a likely route through which growth might affect the risk of violence. Again, then, an assumption is made that growth translates into employment, and that increased employment reduce s the risk of civil war recurring.

These arguments – and the reasoning they are built on, together with the evidence they present – are important to understand and to discuss in thinking through the assumed relationship between unemployment and conflict. For this reason, Paul Collier’s pieces are important first readings to inform a discussion.

Reading 1: Collier, P. (2000). Doing well out of war: an economic perspective. In M. Berdal and D. Malone (eds.), Greed and grievance: Economic agendas in civil wars, pp.91-112. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Available as a conference paper (1999): http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTKNOWLEDGEFORCHANGE/Resources/491519- 1199818447826/28137.pdf Reading 2: Collier, P. & Hoeffler, A. (1998). On economic causes of civil war. Oxford Economic Papers 50(4), 563-573. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oep/50.4.563 Reading 3: Collier, P. (2007). Post-conflict recovery: How should policies be distinctive? Oxford: Centre for the Study of African Economies. http://users.ox.ac.uk/~econpco/research/pdfs/PostConflict-Recovery.pdf

However, there is rather little direct evidence to confirm that unemployment has played as important a role as this kind of economic logic would predict. This is partly because data on unemployment across many low-income countries, and even more so data on youth unemployment, are often highly unreliable and a poor basis, especially, for cross-country comparisons or regression analysis. Labour market data in developing countries have many problems, including infrequent labour force surveys, and survey questionnaires whose design is based on inappropriate OECD economic structures. An example of an analysis showing the problems specifically in rural labour market statistics in Africa is Carlos Oya’s article:

Reading 4: Oya, C. (2013). Rural wage employment in Africa: Methodological issues and emerging evidence, Review of African Political Economy, 40(136), 251-273. dx.doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2013.794728

The implication is that we have to be very wary of leaping to conclusions about the role that labour markets, employment and unemployment play in violent conflict (and this extends to the study of other forms of violence such as terrorism, membership of and participation in violent gangs, and indeed intimate partner violence). It also puts the onus on researchers, development agencies, and policy makers to engage with a wider array of carefully produced types of evidence. As an increasingly sophisticated literature on violent conflict in developing countries has suggested, there is in fact evidence that it is not simply opportunity cost, or, directly, unemployment, that motivates individuals to participate in collective (or private) violence.