That is a year per page. Not bad. And kind of terrifying.
I am talking about my entry, Post-Conflict Recovery in Africa: The Micro Level, in the upcoming Oxford Companion to the Economics of Africa. An excerpt:
Until about ten years ago, most of our micro-knowledge came from public health: epidemiologists measured mortality, morbidity and disease; psychologists measured the incidence and determinants of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In the 1990s a handful of labor economists studied the labor market impacts of military service, but limited their attention to American and European veterans.
In the past decade, however, economists and political scientists have attacked these questions with increasing vigor and rigor. The majority new evidence comes from Africa, partly because Africa has had more war, and partly (one speculates) because African states have been less able to deter meddling researchers from data collection.
The surreal part: all this was borne of a chance encounter in the slowest Internet café in Nairobi. I couldn’t help but start talking to the cute researcher slash humanitarian worker next to me. I didn’t know a thing about war. I haven’t even seen Rambo or Platoon. But ten months later I’m on a plane to northern Uganda, to get a crash course in conflict zones, child soldiers, and recovery after war. Three years later I’m married to her. And still working on post-conflict recovery.
I was supposed to do my dissertation on coffee. My advisers were distressed, to say the least.
Life, and PhDs, take you funny places. Funny places that can be described in approximately six pages.
Comments on the draft welcome.
I am not sure I agree with a few points in the article. Here are some of them:
1. The civil war in Ethiopia was not limited to a small peripheral region. At the end of the war, a country of Ethiopia’s size was transformed into a landlocked state. One of the places where the war was most fought was Tigrai which for centuries has a particular importance in nation-building efforts in Ethiopia.
2. The center was not captured easily. Unless you clearly define what you mean by ‘captured easily,’ I know for sure that regime change in my country occurred after seventeen years of war and after deaths of hundreds of thousands.
3. Perhaps the civil war in Ethiopia destroyed fewer farms and businesses than was the case in Liberia. But, you should also realise that there were indirect effects of the war which destroyed assets in the country. Forced conscription of rural labour, forced underpriced collection of farm outputs, endless contributions to the war effort were cases in point.
Thank you for sharing this. It seems one dilemma in the analysis of post-conflict recovery is determining the basis on which countries/conflicts can be compared in a meaningful way. We often use battle death counts to judge whether a conflict was in fact a “war” or not, but of course 1000 deaths in a small country like Rwanda (much less 800,000) has a far different effect on the state and governance than does 1000 deaths somewhere in India (or even DRC, for a neighborhood comparison). I think we have tended to treat civil war as dichotomous for the sake of quantitative ease, but fine-tuning gradations of conflict severity (and/or distinguishing between center vs. autonomy seeking) may be more fruitful. Also, I think a discussion of the distinction between institutions, governance, and democracy may be useful. You could say Uganda and Rwanda emerged with stronger institutions after civil war, but what this has meant for governance and democracy is a different thing altogether, and is quite different even if you compare these two countries.
Anyway, just some thoughts; looking forward to the final version.