Extreme Weather and Civil War: Does Drought Fuel Conflict in Somalia through Livestock Price Shocks?

Abstract

A growing body of evidence shows a causal relationship between extreme weather events and civil conflict incidence at the global level. We find that this causality is also valid for droughts and local violent conflicts in a within‐country setting over a short time frame in the case of Somalia. We estimate that a one standard deviation increase in drought intensity and length raises the likelihood of conflict by 62%. We also find that drought affects conflict through livestock price changes, establishing livestock markets as the primary channel of transmission in Somalia.

Armed-conflict risks enhanced by climate-related disasters in ethnically fractionalized countries

“…Recent analyses of the societal consequences of droughts in Syria and Somalia indicate that such climatological events may have already contributed to armedconflict outbreaks or sustained conflicts in both countries (54)(55)(56)(57). Similarly, a prolonged drought might have contributed negatively to the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan (58).…”

Does Fiscal Decentralization Good For Reducing Communal Conflict?

“…The presence of mining areas and natural disaster related to climate (drought) in villages level shows the manifestation of competition over scarce and the access rights in controlling them. Some studies show that competing for scarce natural resource and drought are associated with communal conflict such as in Indonesia and Syria [13,31]. Based on the qualitative study, Sukmawan and Yuwono (2012) shows that competition over clean water escalates to the communal conflict between two villages in the border Boyolali District and Semarang District [32].…”

“…Some scholars and practitioners believe that in developing countries, drought is associated with communal conflict. For Instance, a study in Somalia by Maystadt and Ecker (2014) [31], study about drought, natural water scarcity in Syria [32] and research in Boyolali and Semarang, Indonesia about competition over clean waters [33] …”

Climate Change and Violence: Insights from Political Science

“…Panels A and B show that for precipitation and drought, findings are quite mixed with some studies detecting a relationship between above average rainfall and conflict operationalized as riots or violent events [54,62,77], but with approximately half of the results being insignificant or mixed [50, 53, 58, 70•, 78], and others finding support for the scarcity scenario either unconditionally or in vulnerable contexts [45,53,77,79]. Some studies find heterogeneous effects for different types of violence [70•, 71].…”

“…Survey-based studies are one promising way of addressing this [19••, 89]. Another related strategy is to limit the investigation to a setting with a dominant mode of production and test approximations of competing causal mechanisms that allow for rejecting some and keeping other hypothesized relationships [53]. These are strategies for bounded generalizations, but are beneficial for theory building as they enable us to better understand under which contexts certain mechanisms are likely to materialize.…”