Borderline Disorder: (De facto) Historical Ethnic Borders and Contemporary Conflict in Africa Speaker(s): Ömer Özak Language: English Enquiry: econhist@hku.hkQuantitative History Webinar Series - Borderline Disorder: (De facto) Historical Ethnic Borders and Contemporary Conflict in Africa [Ömer Özak, Southern Methodist University]
Information
Ömer Özak and his coauthor explore the effect of historical ethnic borders on contemporary non-civil conflict in Africa. Exploiting variations across artificial regions (i.e., grids of 50x50km) within an ethnicity's historical homeland, they document that both the intensive and extensive margins of contemporary conflict are concentrated close to historical ethnic borders. Following a theory-based instrumental variable approach, which generates a plausibly exogenous ethno-spatial partition of Africa, they find that grid cells with historical ethnic borders have 27 percentage points higher probability of conflict and 7.9 percentage points higher probability of being the initial location of a conflict. In this Quantitative History Webinar, Ömer will share their findings and explain in great detail the key underlying mechanisms: competition for agricultural land, population pressure, cultural similarity and weak property rights.
Ömer's coauthor is Emilio Depetris-Chauvin (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile).
Live on Zoom on October 15, 2020
09:00 Hong Kong/Beijing/Singapore | 10:00 Tokyo | 12:00 Sydney
20:00 Previous day Dallas Time | 21:00 Previous day New York Time
About the Speaker(s)
Event Poster
Notes
Photo credit: Africa Murdock 1959 by George Murdock, Suzanne Blier, Nathan Nunn
(Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0: Owner: blewis)
About the Quantitative History Webinar Series
The Quantitative History Webinar Series, convened by Professor Zhiwu Chen and Dr. Chicheng Ma of The University of Hong Kong (HKU), aims to provide researchers, teachers and students with an online intellectual platform to keep up to date with the latest research in the field, promoting the dissemination of research findings and interdisciplinary use of quantitative methods in historical research. The Series is co-organized by the International Society for Quantitative History, HKU Business School, and the Asia Global Institute (AGI).
Conveners:
Professor Zhiwu Chen
Dr. Chicheng Ma
