Wartime Displacement as Land Grabbing: Evidence from Colombia
Juan Tellez
University of South Carolina
Abstract:
Whether and how economic growth can reduce conflict is of critical interest to scholars and policymakers. Political economy accounts of conflict typically emphasize that changing economic conditions can shift labor supplies from work to combat. As wages decrease, or the value of lootable wealth increases, peasants put down their tools and join the insurgency. Here, I instead propose that economic shocks can generate violence through channels that are unrelated to the conflict labor supply. Focusing on rural settings, I argue that shocks to land-intensive agriculture can produce incentives for elites and armed actors to collude in forcibly displacing civilians to expand production. I leverage the rapid growth of the African palm industry in Colombia in the midst of the civil war to test these conjectures. Using novel municipal-level data, an original survey of rural, conflict-afflicted households and a variety of methodological approaches, I find evidence that suggests the adoption of palm-oil increased displacement at the municipal-level, even as wages increased over this time period. Households displaced from palm-oil regions were also more likely to report being displaced by elites and allied armed groups, indicate they were displaced for their land and tended to hold more land pre-displacement than their counterparts displaced from other regions. The results suggest economic growth and victimization can go hand in hand, and further that elites and armed groups can cooperate under the ‘fog of war’ for private gain unrelated to the war effort.
Discussants:
Thomas Flores (George Mason University)
Jonathan Pinckney (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
Javier Osorio (University of Arizona)
OPSC Coordinator:
Cassy Dorff (Vanderbilt)
Graduate Assistant:
Heesun Yoo (Vanderbilt)
