Angry or Weary? How Violence Impacts Attitudes toward Peace among Darfurian Refugees

• Author: Chad Hazlett
• Published date: 01 May 2020
• Date: 01 May 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0022002719879217
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Angry or Weary?

How Violence Impacts

Attitudes toward Peace

among Darfurian Refugees

Chad Hazlett

1

Abstract

Does exposure to violence motivate individuals to support further violence or to

seek peace? Such questions are central to our understanding of how conflicts evolve,

terminate, and recur. Yet, convincing empirical evidence as to which response

dominates—even in a specific case—has been elusive, owing to the inability to rule

out confounding biases. This article employs a natural experiment based on the

indiscriminacy of violence within villages in Darfur to examine how refugees’

experiences of violence affect their attitudes toward peace. The results are con-

sistent with a pro-peace or “weary” response: individuals directly harmed by vio-

lence were more likely to report that peace is possible and less likely to demand

execution of their enemies. This provides microlevel evidence supporting earlier

country-level work on “war-weariness” and extends the growing literature on the

effects of violence on individuals by including attitudes toward peace as an important

outcome. These findings suggest that victims harmed by violence during war can play

a positive role in settlement and reconciliation processes.

Keywords

attitudes toward peace, conflict, quasi-experiment, causal inference, violence

1

Departments of Statistics and Political Science, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Chad Hazlett, Departments of Statistics and Political Science, UCLA, 3264 Bunche Hall, Los Angeles,

CA 90095, USA.

Email: chazlett@ucla.edu

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2020, Vol. 64(5) 844-870

ªThe Author(s) 2019

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0022002719879217

journals.sagepub.com/home/jcr

Large-scale violence directed against civilian populations is a common feature of

many civil wars (Valentino, Huth, and Balch-Lindsay 2004). Beyond the immediate

and horrific human consequences of such violence, it may also have long-term

effects on diverse outcomes including political engagement (e.g., Blattman 2009),

psychological well-being (see, e.g., Pham, Weinstein, and Longman 2004), educa-

tion and employment (Blattman and Annan 2010), and social cooperation (see Bauer

et al. 2016, for review). An important—yet rarely studied—question regarding

violence is its effects on individuals’ support for further violence, on the one hand,

or for peace and reconciliation on the other. Popular accounts often hold that

“violence begets violence.” Yet, experiences with violence may instead heighten

thedesiretomakepeaceorreluctanceto support continued fighting. Existing

theories and evidence from a range of disciplines make both claims. However, prior

efforts to empirically determine how exposure to violence changes individual atti-

tudes toward peace have been stymied by confounding problems: violence does not

occur at random, with those experiencing violence likely to differ in many ways

from those who do not. For example, the more bellicose, anti-peace individuals may

take actions that increase their risk of exposure to violence. Such confounding is

difficult to rule out in many studies and may bias naive comparisons particularly

toward showing that exposure to violence is associated with “angry” or “anti-peace”

attitudes. Solving the confounding problem requires more than controlling for an

assortment of observed covariates, which still leaves estimates vulnerable to unob-

served confounding.

This article employs a quasi-experimental strategy to estimate the effects of being

injured or maimed during attacks on villages in Darfur on attitudes. I argue that

violence was targeted by village and gender but was indiscriminate beyond this.

Comparisons within village and gender show that those who were physically injured

are 12 to 14 percentage points more likely to claim it is possible to make peace with

former enemies and less likely to call for executing their enemies. This evidence is

consistent not with the “angry” response but rather with claims of a “pro-peace” or

“weary” effect ofexposure to violence. I discusspotential limitations andin particular

examine how strongremaining confounding wouldneed to be to alter the conclusions.

Background

Ample theoretical and observational support can be marshaled for either the proposi-

tion that “violence begets violence” or that “violence heightens war-weariness.” Here,

I briefly describe literature related to each proposition as well as closely ali gned

empirical research on how exposure to violence affects a range of other outcomes.

Violence Begets Violence

Arguments from numerous disciplines, not to mention journalistic accounts and folk

theory, hold that exposure to violence during conflict makes civilians more likely to

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