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ID:
181670
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| Summary/Abstract |
We address a debate over the effects of private versus customary property rights on external investment. Despite political economists’ claims that external investors favor private property rights, other experts argue that customary systems enable large-scale “land grabs.” We organize these competing claims, highlighting trade-offs due to differences in legibility versus the ability to displace existing landholders under both systems. We study a natural experiment in Liberia, where law codifies parallel private and customary property rights systems. We use this institutional boundary and difference-in-differences methods to isolate differential changes in external investment under the different property rights systems following the global food crisis of 2007–08. We find a larger increase in land clearing where private property rights prevailed, with such clearing related to more concession activity. Qualitative study of a palm oil concession reveals challenges external investors confront when navigating customary systems.
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| 2 |
ID:
160530
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| Summary/Abstract |
Why are some ethnic groups embroiled in communal conflicts while others are comparably peaceful? We explore the group-specific correlates of communal conflicts in Africa by utilizing a novel dataset combining ethnographic information on group characteristics with conflict data. Specifically, we investigate whether features of the customary political institutions of ethnic groups matter for their communal-conflict involvement. We show how institutional explanations for conflict, developed to explain state-based wars, can be successfully applied to the customary institutions of ethnic groups. We argue that customary institutions can pacify through facilitating credible nonviolent bargaining. Studying 143 ethnic groups, we provide large-N evidence for such an ‘ethnic civil peace’, showing that groups with a higher number of formalized customary institutions, like houses of chiefs, courts and legislatures, are less prone to communal conflict, both internally and with other groups. We also find some evidence, although slightly weaker, that groups with more inclusive or ‘democratic’ customary institutions are less prone to communal conflicts.
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