Studying the Consequences of Civil War: Theoretical and Methodological Challenges

Please join the Comparative Historical Social Sciences as they host Ana Arjona, Northwestern University. 

Arjona will present her paper Studying the Consequences of Civil War: Theoretical and Methodological Challenges. Civil war can have short- and long-term impacts on human development. A growing debate about how to study the long-term legacies of political violence (including civil war) has highlighted important theoretical and methodological challenges. We contribute to this debate by identifying three additional challenges when studying the consequences of civil war on developmental outcomes: (i) how to consider wartime phenomena beyond violence as part of the exposure to civil war; (ii) how to aggregate exposure to such phenomena over time; and (iii) how to conceptualize and measure functional subnational units where human development outcomes are unlikely to be spatially independent. We illustrate our argument with original data on civil war phenomena and human development outcomes in Colombia. Our analysis shows that the choices scholars make to address these challenges affect their findings. We conclude with preliminary ideas about how the field can collectively develop theoretical priors to guide these choices.

Ana Arjona is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University. She was the Director of the Center for the Study of Security and Drugs at Los Andes University in Bogota, Colombia in 2018-2019, where she is now an Associate Researcher. She obtained her PhD in political science from Yale University (with distinction), and has been a Fellow at the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her research investigates the dynamics and legacies of organized violence, especially civil wars and organized crime, local governance, state building, and the foundations of political order. She is the author of the award-winning book Rebelocracy: Social Order in the Colombian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2016), co-editor of Rebel Governance in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and author of several articles and book chapters.

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