Land-Use Change and Communal Conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper addresses the correlation between land-use changes and communal conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, by articulating the analysis on a 0.5° × 0.5° regular grid, we estimate the probability of a communal conflict event at time in any given cell as a function of a set of variables for land-use variations, a spatial and a temporal lag of the dependent variable, a series of climate attributes and time-invariant geo-physical attributes (all measured at cell level), and a set of institutional attributes (measured at country level). The results show that a positive variation in land-use for agricultural and urban purposes significantly increases both the probability and the number of communal conflicts. On the contrary, the impact of increasing pasture land is not so clear, since results supporting the evidence of a negative relation between pasture use and communal conflicts risk are not robust to different model specifications.