Do Nightlights Emissions Enlighten? Exploring the effect of local economic conditions on violence against civilians during civil war

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Why do rebels and state forces abduct, maim, and even kill civilians during civil war? What can the international community and individual states do to protect those civilians? Estimates of civilian casualties range from 750,000 deaths since 1989 to 22 million victims since 1945. Policy-makers from civil war affected states, development institutions, and security officials are interested in protecting local communities and preventing the causes of violence against civilians. While it is difficult to intervene directly into active zones of internal conflict, building resilience in local communities through economic development programs either before or in the aftermath of conflict constitutes a plausible strategy to protect civilians. In order to develop such strategies, we need to better understand the link between local economic conditions and violence against civilians. Although conflict researchers put a lot of weight on the influence of economic conditions when explaining the outbreak of civil wars, these theories do not carry over into explaining patterns of violence during conflict. The lack of appropriate and reliable data is one reason for this mismatch. This project will create the important precondition of valid and reliable data on local economic conditions to assess the economics-violence link. The innovative new dataset will triangulate satellite-measured nightlights data as a time-varying proxy for economic development with both qualitative and quantitative information from Uganda. To do so the investigators combine the experience of a historian with crucial local knowledge on Uganda, a geographer who is an expert in Geographic Information Systems, and a political scientist intimately familiar with the theory and the empirical data on violence against civilians. At the same time, the project will build capacity among researchers and students from GW4 universities (Bath, Bristol, Exeter, Plymouth) and Makerere University in Uganda as well as development practitioners from UK governmental and non-governmental organisations to work with Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The investigators will develop four audience-targeted training workshops to equip the aforementioned stakeholders with the ability to explore important development and security research problems on their own using geographic data.