From Conflict to Conflicts:War-Induced Displacement, Land Conflicts, and Agricultural Productivity in Post-war Northern Uganda

Francisco Mugizi, Tomoya Matsumoto

Department of Economics, National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS), Japan. Otaru University of Commerce, Japan

For two decades since 1986, Northern Uganda experienced an armed conflict resulting in the internally displacement of people. Following ceasefire agreement in 2006 nearly all the displaced persons have now resettled to their original homes. This paper examines the impact of war-induced displacement on land conflicts in post-war period. We find noteworthy results: households that were displaced far away from their homes are more likely to have new land conflicts, more likely to be concerned about land conflicts, have higher proportion of parcels with new land conflicts, and higher proportion of parcels with concerns about land conflicts. Our results are robust to a number of robustness checks. The number of years the household spent without doing farming in home village, and weakening of informal institutions of land governance seem to be the main transmission mechanisms of the obtained results. We also find that land conflicts are detrimental to agricultural productivity.

Event: Land Governance in an Interconnected World_Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty_2018

Document type:From Conflict to Conflicts:War-Induced Displacement, Land Conflicts, and Agricultural Productivity in Post-war Northern Uganda (1456 kB - pdf)