Fighting Over Land: Theory and Empirical Evidence from Colombia

Project Information

FOL

Grant agreement ID: 708448

DOI

10.3030/708448

Project closed

EC signature date 2 December 2016

Start date 1 May 2017

End date 31 May 2019

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 195 454,80

EU contribution

€ 195 454,80

Coordinated by

INSTITUTE OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FOL (Fighting Over Land: Theory and Empirical Evidence from Colombia)

Reporting period: 2017-05-01 to 2019-04-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Most internal armed conflicts have taken place in agrarian developing economies, where land is one of the most valuable rural assets. In this context, even if these conflicts are borne out of grievances, rebel groups in long civil conflict may eventually fight for greed, where illegal appropriation of assets and resources turn into a common practice. In fact, land appropriation becomes an important source of power and territorial domination for armed actors, boosting inequality and inefficiency in land market transactions. Surprisingly, whereas unequal land tenure schemes have received ample academic interest as initial motivations and intensifying factors in armed conflict, very little is known about the mechanisms and impact that armed conflict may have over land tenure structures in the long run. This lack of empirical and theoretical evidence largely stems from the fact that conflict-affected countries often do not have a land tenure registry.

The aim of this project is to develop a research agenda on the long-term effect of civil conflict on institutions, particularly on land tenure structure. Dr Muñoz-Mora will develop a theoretical model on the ongoing civil conflict and asset appropriation, through which he can derive a set of hypotheses that can be tested using a unique dataset from Antioquia, a western-Colombia region. The empirical data consists of unique plot-level census data from different moments in time (i.e. 1955, 1995, 2000, 2006), which coincides with the main turning points in the Colombian conflict.

Accordingly, this project will assess four key issues:

• Which motivations could explain the behaviour of armed actors to fight over land?
• Which characteristics make a given land area more likely to be under dispute?
• Which type of distortions to the land tenure structure can be attributed to conflict in Antioquia-Colombia?
• What is the effect of the length of exposure to violence on land markets?

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

"The first task that Dr Muñoz-Mora developed within the project has been consolidating the historical census plot from Antioquia-Colombia from 1950 recovered from archives. These censuses gather information about location, size and ownership of every plot in Antioquia- Colombia (i.e. around 600,000 plots in 125 villages). This Cadastral information was kept on microfilms that have to be scanned and then converted into a readable format (e.g. csv). This has been executed for over 120.000 pages. The data from the years 1997 and 2000 were saved on special disks for which the reader is no longer available on the market. Therefore, Dr Muñoz-Mora hired a specialist to read and then convert the former dataset in a usable format. Information from 2006 onward is already available in readable formats.

Once the data was recovered, Dr Muñoz-Mora started the cleaning process that consisted of two main steps. First, he cleaned any miss-coding or atypical information from the dataset (e.g. plot size, location or ownership). Second, since the data concerns census data, both public and private land is included. As a result, he will need to filter out all non-private land to guarantee an unbiased sample.

In parallel to this process, Dr Muñoz-Mora has been working on three complementary research papers that will help to build a framework about the relationship between civil conflict and land tenure structure. These publications include:

• ""The role of land property rights in the war on illicit crops: Evidence from Colombia"", where Dr Muñoz-Mora and co-authors use part of the Cadastral data to study the effect of the formalisation of land property rights in the war against illicit crops, using the case of Colombia. This was published in March 2018 in the journal World Development.

• ""Strategic Expropriation and Civil War: Evidence from Colombia"", where Dr Muñoz-Mora and co-authors examine what happened at the end of the conflict with non-state actors, while peace negotiations were ongoing. In particular, we ask whether right-wing paramilitaries strategically responded to those peace negotiations by increasing the land expropriation in anticipation of their inevitable subsequent demobilisation. The working paper will available shortly.

• ""This Land Is My Land: Understanding the Relationship between Armed Con-flict and Land in Urabá, Colombia"", where Dr Muñoz-Mora explores the relationship between armed conflict and changes in land tenure in Urabá, a northwestern region in Colombia, considered to have been one of the epicenters of the armed conflict during the 1980s and 1990s. The working paper will available shortly."

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

"The unique contribution of this research programme will be threefold:

First, it will push the frontier of current conflict and development research within the disciplines of economics and political science by expanding the breadth of research to new and innovative topic. On the one hand, the theoretical approach will contribute to the deeper theoretical understanding on how long exposure to violence may create distortion to institutions. On the second hand, thanks to the very unique data set from Colombia and the identification strategy, the findings will allow providing the magnitude of the causal effect on land tenure structure of a long exposure to civil war.

Second, it will promote knowledge transfer and the translation of research results into effective public policies in conflict-affected countries, by uncovering the mechanisms through which long exposure to civil war may modify institutions such as land property rights. This better understanding will provide important technical support for designing and applying transitory justice in a post-conflict setting. In the case of Colombia, the Colombian government has launched the ""law of victims and land restitution"", this law defines under which conditions victims could initiate an administrative process for claiming back their expropriated land. Nevertheless, the little knowledge about the mechanisms whereby conflict may have affected the land market has created an important hurdle for the application of such policies. In this sense, this research will help victims and policy-makers to understand the impact of conflict on land tenure structure through quantitative evidence. Furthermore, while these empirical results cannot be generalised to other contexts given the complexities of each conflict-affected country, it will provide important evidence about the existence of such a relationship. This is particularly important in countries in a post-conflict period, such as: Bosnia, Kosovo, Timor-Leste, Rwanda, Tanzania, among others, where land issues are one of the main challenge for the sustainability of peace.

Third, this research will develop sustainable capacities in the area of post-war studies and peace sustainability, by proposing and documenting new methods based on the use of archive data on the study of long-term effect of civil war.
"

Dr Munoz Mora recovering archived data in Colombia in December 2017