Scandinavian Working Papers in Economics

Working Paper Series,
Uppsala University, Department of Economics

No 2015:1: Preparing for Genocide: Community Work in Rwanda

Evelina Bonnier (), Jonas Poulsen (), Thorsten Rogall () and Miri Stryjan ()
Additional contact information
Evelina Bonnier: Stockholm School of Economics
Jonas Poulsen: Department of Economics, Postal: Department of Economics, Uppsala University, P.O. Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden
Thorsten Rogall: IIES
Miri Stryjan: IIES

Abstract: How do political elites prepare the civilian population for participation in violent conflict? We empirically investigate this question using village-level data from the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. Every Saturday before 1994, Rwandan villagers had to meet to work on community infrastructure, a practice called Umuganda. This practice was highly politicized and, in the years before the genocide, regularly used for spreading political propaganda. To establish causality, we exploit cross-sectional variation in meeting intensity induced by exogenous weather fluctuations. We find that an additional rainy Saturday resulted in a five percent lower civilian participation rate in genocide violence. These results pass a number of indirect tests of the exclusion restriction as well as other robustness checks and placebo tests.

Keywords: Conflict; Rainfall

JEL-codes: D74; N47

40 pages, January 19, 2015

Full text files 

FULLTEXT02.pdf PDF-file Updated version
FULLTEXT01.pdf PDF-file

Download statistics

Questions (including download problems) about the papers in this series should be directed to Ulrika Öjdeby ()
Report other problems with accessing this service to Sune Karlsson ().

RePEc:hhs:uunewp:2015_001This page generated on 2024-09-13 22:17:38.