CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 212Political Conflict and GovernanceNatural Resources and Economic DevelopmentTransboundary Water Resource Management

Drought and Civil War in Sub‐Saharan Africa

Couttenier, Mathieu, Soubeyran, Raphael·2014·The Economic Journal
DOI 10.1111/ecoj.12042
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

We explore the relationship between drought and civil war. We show that the link between rainfall, temperature and civil war found in the literature may be driven by aggregate shocks (such as global climate) that were not accounted for. A standard differences-in-differences specification relying only on within country variation reveals a much weaker and insignificant link between weather variables and civil war. To increase statistical power, we propose a country-specific measure of drought that describes social exposure to water stress in a more efficient way than rainfall and temperature. We use the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) which combines rainfall, temperature (and soil texture) and takes important aspects that were missing from previous studies into account: nonlinearities - the effect of contemporaneous rainfall and temperatures depends on the climate history -, interaction effects - e.g. low rainfall is more important in hot years -, and threshold effects due to the limited capacity of the soil - e.g. rainfall water will run off when the soil layers are full. We continue to find a weak positive link between drought and civil war.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1111/ecoj.12042

Cites

126 of 126 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

We couldn’t retrieve this paper’s full text, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Other analyses failed to confirm a drought-conflict link.

    “Yet, other analyses failed to confirm such a link (Theisen et al 2011, Couttenier and Soubeyran 2014, Wischnath and Buhaug 2014, Yeeles 2015).”

    From The impacts of climate change on violent conflict risk: a review of causal pathways (2024) · cites this paper as Couttenier and Soubeyran 2014

  • There is some evidence that countries with a relatively low level of democracy that are hit by a drought are more prone to civil war than countries with a relatively high level of democracy.

    “There is some evidence that countries with a relatively low level of democracy that are hit by a drought are more prone to civil war than countries with a relatively high level of democracy (114).”

    From Vicious Circles: Violence, Vulnerability, and Climate Change (2021) · cites this paper as [114]

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

6 of the 132 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Couttenier, M., & Soubeyran, R.
Affiliations
  • Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (FR)
  • INRA‐LAMETA
ORCID
Couttenier, Mathieu
Venue
The Economic Journal
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Published
2013-07-16
Volume
124
Issue
575
Pages
201-244
ISSN
  • 0013-0133 (ISSN-L)
  • 1468-0297
DOI
10.1111/ecoj.12042
OpenAlex
W3023656966
Cited by
212
References
132
Citations by year
2026: 9 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 12 · 2023: 13 · 2022: 19 · 2021: 26 · 2020: 21 · 2019: 23 · 2018: 18 · 2017: 10 · 2016: 16 · 2015: 8 · 2014: 12 · 2013: 5 · 2012: 2
FWCI
42.33
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
doi.wiley.com/10.1002/tdm_license_1.1 (tdm, 777 d)
Locations
  • The Economic Journal (publishedVersion)
  • HAL (submittedVersion)
  • IRIS (submittedVersion)
  • SERVAL (Université de Lausanne) (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Political Conflict and Governance
  • Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › General Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Natural Resources and Economic Development
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Transboundary Water Resource Management
Keywords
drought, civil war, sub-Saharan Africa, conflict onset, climate shocks

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review