IPA is collaborating with the UN Peacebuilding Fund, UNHCR and the Justice and Peace Commission (JPC) in Liberia to map, track, and mitigate violence and conflict in rural communities.
The Liberian government identified 250 of the most conflict-prone towns and villages in three of its most war-affected counties: Lofa, Nimba and Grand Gedeh. IPA is following a panel of more than 6000 community members and leaders across the 250 towns.
Key research questions include the following:
- How do war experiences shape present political participation and attitudes?
- Can we predict or explain the incidence of violent and non-violent conflicts, including:
- inter-group violence;
- land conflicts;
- mob justice;
- violent crime; and
- domestic abuse?
- How do economic shocks impact community-level conflict?
- Can conflict be mitigated by a UNHCR/JPC program of conflict resolution training and peace education?
Principal Researchers
- Chris Blattman
- Alexandra Hartman
Evaluation activities are supported by Mattias Lundberg and Gwendolyn Taylor of the World Bank HDCYN, with financing from the Bank’s Spanish Impact Evaluation Fund and the Italian Trust Fund for Children and Youth in Africa.
Predicting and Explaining Community Conflict
Program Evaluation
Training in community conflict resolution is one the most common international peace building interventions after war. Such “peace education” seeks to strengthen local capacities for justice while the national justice and police system rebuild.
Unfortunately, we have little hard evidence on their impact on reducing and resolving conflict, whether in the form of ethnic rivalries, land disputes, or domestic violence.
We propose a research program to answer the peacebuilders’ central concern: is peace education a worthwhile use of scarce peacebuilding resources? And if it works, why?
Liberia recently emerged from fourteen years of brutal civil war. Formal systems of justice are shattered, and informal systems of conflict resolution are under strain. Interethnic tension, rampant domestic violence, and widespread competition for land poses a threat to Liberia’s fragile peace. As part of a national reconciliation effort, the UN and the Government of Liberia are implementing a large-scale community peace education program.
The program will enroll participants from 125 communities in community workshops on conflict resolution. The workshops target a tenth of community adults, including all leaders, and last eight days over the course of one month.
These workshops aim to strengthen informal institutions for preventing and resolving land, ethnic and domestic conflicts by empowering community members to prevent and resolve conflicts in their own lives and their communities.
Evaluation Strategy
IPA is implementing a randomized evaluation of the conflict resolution and peace education program, alongside an in-depth qualitative study of the process and impacts.
Along with randomizing the intervention itself, the scale and timing of the intervention are also assigned randomly, allowing us to assess the scalability and durability of any impacts. To our knowledge this will be the first large-scale, rigorous, and mixed-methods evaluation of a peacebuilding intervention.
In addition to quantifying these impacts, we also aim to assess the types of conflicts and communities that benefit most from peace education, the optimum scale of such programs, and lessons learned for program design in future. Ultimately, our objective is to inform governments, NGOs, and UN agencies worldwide on the effectiveness and design of peace education programs.
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