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Contents:
1. Welcome to the third MICROCON Newsletter
2. Fieldwork news
Civil war and activity choice in Burundi – report on the implementation of a national household survey
New fieldwork
3. Publications
Policy Briefings
Research Working Papers
4. Training
Second Call for Applications: MICROCON INCO Training Fund
Summer School 2008
5. Yvan Guichaoua interviewed on Radio France International
6. Other news
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Dear Colleague,
This is the third of our newsletters, which are sent out twice a year. It contains news on our publications to date; news from our fieldwork teams; details of our training programme; and information on our plans for 2008.
If you haven't done so already, you can also sign up for alerts of publications in your area of interest as soon as they are published.
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2. Fieldwork news
Civil war and activity choice in Burundi – report on the implementation of a national household survey
Project 15 of MICROCON, 'Civil War and Activity Choice' carried out a national household survey in Burundi in the second half of 2007 in collaboration with a number of partners. This project aims to test the theory that increased risk lowers the average return to farm households. The fieldwork involved researchers from the universities of Antwerp, Brussels and Wageningen, together with the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (ISTEEBU) in Burundi. The project was co-funded by the United States Institute of Peace and the University of Wageningen.
The goal of the survey was to collect micro-level data on the economic, demographic, agricultural, social and psychological situation of Burundian households at the end of a decade-long period of violent civil war, which caused the death of 300,000 people.
The survey aimed at re-interviewing members of rural households who had been interviewed in 1998 at the occasion of the Priority Survey carried out by ISTEEBU and the World Bank. The 1998 survey managed to interview 6600 Burundian households with 3900 residing in rural areas. Several papers, available from the Households in Conflict Network and MICROCON have been written using the 1998 data.
The 2007 survey was carried out by an academic team consisting of Philip Verwimp as research director and three doctoral students Tom Bundervoet, Eleonora Nillesen and Maarten Voors. Prof. Erwin Bulte of Wageningen University supported the team throughout. The National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (ISTEEBU) seconded its technical director Joseph Butoyi to work with the team and led the field interviewers.
In July and early August, after a year-long preparation, the household questionnaire was refined, discussed and pilot-tested. The team hired 50 interviewers supervised by 4 permanent staff members of ISTEEBU. All interviewers had a university degree and almost all had previous interview experience. The team organised a week-long training course to study the household questionnaire in depth. 65 potential interviewers took part in the training, with 50 of these being hired.
With the funding at hand the team set out to re-interview 1000 of the originally interviewed households in the rural areas. These households lived in 100 communities randomly drawn from all 390 rural communities visited by the 1998 survey. The fieldwork was organised in three phases. In the first phase, 50 communities were visited to interview the original households. At the occasion of these interviews, interviewers noted the places of residence of all 1998 members alive in 2007 who were no longer living in the original household. The same occurred in phase two for the other 50 communities. In phase three, interviewers, in small teams, visited all parts of the country, including urban areas to trace the 'split-off households'. These are the household members that were part of the original 1998 households but were not living in that household anymore. For budget reasons the team only re-interviewed sons and daughters of original households who got married in the 1998-2007 period and started their own household. One must realise this was a big logistical exercise to undertake.
In the end 872 of the 1000 original households were found and the team interviewed 536 split-off households. As far as we know it is the first panel survey of this kind in Burundi and one of the few on the African continent.
New fieldwork
We have five research teams who have begun or will shortly begin their MICROCON fieldwork:
Niger
Yvan Guichaoua will shortly leave to do research in North Africa on rebel movements in Niger for project 2: Motives for fighting and group mobilisation. This project examines important questions of formation of group identities and mobilisation of fighters in Nigeria and Niger. It will look at a sample of leaders and those who fight, using qualitative and quantitative datasets, as well as detailed ethnographic work, to explore economic and psychological motivations at both individual and group levels.
Bulgaria
Christian Geiselmann, Daniela Koleva, Teodora Karamelska, Vanya Ivanova and a team of interviewers will be working on project 6: Muslim integration in Bulgaria and Serbia. The project’s methodology relies on semi-structured narrative interviews which are analyzed using qualitative methods (following a methodology set up by Gabriele Rosenthal and Fritz Schütze). The interviews focus on inter-ethnic and inter-religious relationships in the local communities, the way the respondents perceive these relationships, their perception of the own and the other, their interpretation of ethnic/religious group conflict on the local level and personal contacts (including neighbours, friends, colleagues), their values and their experience in avoiding or controlling conflict.
Somaliland
Anna Lindley will shortly be leaving to Somaliland to work on project 12: Causes of forced migration and project 13: Refugees and asylum-seekers in receiving countries. The research will involve key informant consultations, observation, informal discussions; group interviews with key groups of migrants; and in-depth individual interviews with migrants. The field research will allow the project to engage with migrants in key locations, generating micro-level perspectives on the causes, processes and reception issues involved in migration, aiming at facilitating displaced people to voice their experiences and concerns.
South Africa
Jeremy Seekings, Lauren Kahn and Adam Cooper will soon be undertaking the qualitative part of the work for project 21: Poverty, exclusion and violence in South Africa. This work will entail in-depth interviews and focus group discussions, in different parts of metropolitan Cape Town, South Africa’s second largest city. The research will focus on experiences of violence in the home, neighbourhood and elsewhere, and on the interlinkages between these.
Tanzania
At the end of May, Els Lecoutere travelled to Tanzania to undertake research for project 28: The political economy of entitlement to resources in rural Tanzania – An institutional perspective. In this project, productivity, risk management and coping strategies of farmers participating in irrigation schemes will be studied relative to the security of their resource entitlement. Quantitative data will be collected by means of a survey using a standard questionnaire which will include questions on access to land and water in the irrigation scheme, on security of resource entitlement, on agricultural crop production, on individual and household characteristics and wellbeing. In addition, part of the analysis will be based on household level data representative at regional level available for five selected regions data from the Tanzanian National Sample Census of Agriculture 2002/2003.
In addition, a more ethnographic approach will be followed to collect information on the micro-level institutional setting and agency, to analyse the political economic ‘game’ of appropriating and enforcing entitlement to resources within each irrigation scheme. During focus group sessions this more qualitative data will be collected using participatory mapping of the irrigation schemes, participatory power ranking and role play
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3. Publications
Policy Briefings
PB1: Indicators of Potential Conflict - Mansoob Murshed
MICROCON's first Policy Briefing focuses on the factors that contribute to the dangers of violent internal conflict erupting, or re-igniting after a peace has been concluded. Three main risk factors are considered: The breakdown of redistributive mechanisms, democratic transitions and lack of economic progress. The conflict literature has identified greed and grievance as the principle causes of conflict. But for either of them to take the form of large-scale violence there must be other factors at work, specifically a weakening of the 'social contract'. Such a viable social contract can be sufficient to restrain opportunistic behaviour such as theft of resource rents, and the violent expression of grievance. The social contract, therefore, refers to the mechanisms and institutions of peaceful conflict resolution.
PB2: Tackling Civil Unrest: Policing or Redistribution? - Patricia Justino
There is much evidence to suggest that economic and social factors are major causes of civil unrest. However, governments often resort to the use of police and military to tackle such upheavals, rather than using policies that directly address the causes of discontent. This briefing uses data from India to compare the effectiveness of redistributive transfers and policing in reducing conflict. It finds that transfers have a significant effect on the prevention and reduction of civil unrest, particularly in the medium term. While policing reduces conflict in the short term, the continued use of police has either inconsequential effects, or even leads to increases in rioting. These findings have important lessons for other countries where social cohesion breaks frequently, but large-scale conflict may be avoidable.
Research Working Papers
RWP4: Poverty Dynamics, Violent Conflict and Convergence in Rwanda
Civil war and genocide in the 1990-2000 period in Rwanda have had differential economic impacts on the country’s provinces. The reasons for this are the death toll of the genocide, the location of battles, the waves of migration and the local resurgence of war. As a result, the labour/land and labour/capital ratios at the provincial level changed considerably during that period. Using two cross-sections, this paper finds empirical evidence for convergence between provinces following the conflict shocks: previously richer provinces in the east and in the north of the country experienced lower, even negative, economic growth compared to the poorer western and southern provinces. This has in turn affected significantly the dynamics of household poverty in Rwanda in the same period. Using a small but unique panel of households surveyed before and after the conflict period, it is found that households whose house was destroyed or who lost land ran a higher risk of falling into poverty. This was particularly the case for households who were land-rich before the genocide. This is not found to be the case for the loss of household labour. In this case the effect depends on the violent or non-violent character of the loss.
RWP5: Health and Civil War in Rural Burundi
This working paper combines detailed event data about the timing and location of armed conflict with household survey data to examine the impact of the civil war in Burundi on the health status of young children who were exposed to it. Research by non-governmental organizations finds that children are among the most affected by conflict and the identification strategy used in this paper allows us to empirically confirm and quantify the magnitude of this. The empirical identification strategy exploits variation in the timing of the civil war across Burundi’s provinces and the related variation in which birth cohorts of children were exposed to the fighting and the duration of their exposure. The paper finds that exposure to war decreases children's height for age compared to non-exposed children, and the longer the exposure, the larger the impact.
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4. Training
Second Call for Applications - MICROCON INCO Training Fund
The Second Call for Applications to MICROCON’s INCO Training Fund is now open. The INCO Fund is intended to support and encourage the training and mobility of young and senior, male and female researchers from INCO countries - developing countries that have cooperation agreements with the European Union. The Fund aims to allow researchers to participate actively in research activities being undertaken by MICROCON’s partners, and to share knowledge and experience. This will build their own expertise in the micro level analysis of violent conflict, and help them to build linkages with MICROCON.
Last year, five candidates were selected, from Georgia, Uganda, Nepal, Colombia and Burundi. They are visiting Istituto Affari Internazionali in Rome, the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin, the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá and Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
Summer School 2008
MICROCON's first Summer School will be taking place in Olympia, Greece from 6th-13th July 2008. It will provide training in innovative multidisciplinary methods in conflict research, including topics such as quantitative and qualitative methods, field practices and research ethics. Participants will be a mix of MICROCON researchers and external researchers selected through a competitive application process.
All places have now been filled, but training materials from the course will be posted on the MICROCON website after the course. If you would like to be notified when these materials become available, please let us know.
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5. Yvan Guichaoua interviewed on Radio France International
Yvan Guichaoua, from the Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity at the University of Oxford, gave an interview to Radio France International about the conflict in Niger, focussing on the rebel group called le Mouvement Nigérien pour la Justice (MNJ). He answered questions on the group's membership, the extent that the group's claims reflect the population's grievances and the possibility of international mediation.
The initiators of the MNJ are combattants from an older rebellion, and particularly from a group called Front de libération de l’Aïr et de l’Azawak (FLAA). The military leader of the MNJ is called Aghali Alambo, who was the military Chief of Staff for Rhissa ag Boula in 1990s. He seems to have brought a cohesion and discipline to his troops which contrasts with the divisions that the rebellion saw in the 1990s.
The MNJ are making a number of claims on the Niamey government. They believe that the Agadez region is marginalised by Niamey, and demand that this be corrected through employment quotas. They are also demanding decentralisation, and that at least 50% of the revenue from uranium mines in Agadez be invested in the region.
Yvan said that the MNJ would be open to a regional summit to discuss the conflict, as relations with the government are currently at an impasse. It is less clear whether the government would be open to such negotiations, as it does not want to lose face militarily. However, there are enough transnational security issues in the Saharan zone to justify a regional solution.
Read the full interview transcript in French here
Yvan is a researcher on project 2: Motives for fighting and group mobilisation.
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7. Other news:
Ana María Ibáñez publishes World Development article on forced migration in Colombia
Patricia Justino publishes IDS In Focus brief on Collier's The Bottom Billion
Frances Stewart publishes paper on the political situation in Kenya
Nathalie Tocci publishes article on EU incentives for promoting peace in Accord
Daniela Koleva presents paper on Oral Histories at the European Social Science History conference
Tilman Brück publishes paper on external debt and post-conflict countries in World Development