Resources and Governance in Sierra Leone’s Civil War
Publisher: Journal of Development Studies
Author(s): Maarten Voors, Peter Van Der Windt, Kostadis J. Papaioannou, and Erwin Bulte
Date: 2016
Topics: Conflict Causes, Governance
Countries: Sierra Leone
We empirically investigate the role of natural resources, and governance in explaining variation in the intensity of conflict during the 1991–2002 civil war in Sierra Leone. As a proxy for governance quality we exploit exogenous variation in political competition at the level of the chieftaincy. As a proxy for resources we use data on the location of pre-war mining sites. Our main result is that neither governance nor resources robustly explains the onset or duration of violence during the civil war in Sierra Leone.