Civil War and the Formation of Social Trust in Kosovo

• Author: Sara Kijewski,Markus Freitag
• DOI: 10.1177/0022002716666324
• Published date: 01 April 2018
• Date: 01 April 2018
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Civil War and the

Formation of Social

Trust in Kosovo:

Posttraumatic Growth

or War-related Distress?

Sara Kijewski

1

, and Markus Freitag

1

Abstract

While a new, growing subset of the literature argues that armed conflict does not

necessarily erode social cohesion in the postwar era, we challenge this perspective

and examine how civil war experiences shape social trust in Kosovo after the war

from 1998 to 1999. Based on a nationwide survey conducted in 2010 and the dis-

aggregated conflict event data set of the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data

Project, we simultaneously analyze the impact of individual war-related experiences

and exposure to war in the community through hierarchical analyses of twenty-six

municipalities. Our findings confirm that civil war is negatively related to social trust.

This effect proves to be more conclusive for individual war experiences than for

contextual war exposure. Arguably, the occurrence of instances of violence with

lasting psychological as well as social structural consequences provides people with

clear evidence of the untrustworthiness, uncooperativeness, and hostility of others,

diminishing social trust in the aftermath of war.

Keywords

civil war, trust, social capital, subnational comparison, multilevel analysis, internal

armed conflict

1

Department of Social Sciences, Institute of Political Science, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

Corresponding Author:

Sara Kijewski, Institute of Political Science, University of Bern, Fabrikstrasse 8, Bern 3012, Switzerland.

Email: sara.kijewski@ipw.unibe.ch

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2018, Vol. 62(4) 717-742

ªThe Author(s) 2016

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DOI: 10.1177/0022002716666324

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In addition to the devastating consequences of civil wars in terms of deaths, human

suffering, displacement, and material destruction, it is now widely noticed that such

conflicts not only lead to the breakdown of society but also force societal change

(Chen, Loayaza, and Reynal-Querol 2008; Kalyvas 2006; Keen 1997; Newman

2014; Wood 2008). While conventional wisdom claims that war inevitably disrupts

social cohesion, an emerging subset of the literature emphasizes the positive devel-

opment of societal as well as political life following such conflicts. Referred to as

posttraumatic growth (PTG), positive transformations of personal outlooks and

social relations after traumatic experiences are related to the favorable changes in

dimensions of social cohesion such as collective action, prosocial behavior, and

political participation (see, e.g., Bellows and Miguel 2006, 2009; Blattman 2009;

Frazier et al. 2013; Gilligan, Pasquale, and Samii 2013). Arguably, what has been

shown for civic engagement of child soldiers in Uganda (Blattman 2009) or victims

of displacement in Sierra Leone (Bellows and Miguel 2006, 2009) should also hold

for trust relations in the general population of postconflict societies.

In this study, wechallenge this perspective and evaluate how civil warexperiences

shape social trustin Kosovo after the war from 1998 to 1999. The conflict left a deep

mark on Kosovo’s society, with a majority of the population becoming expelled or

displaced, large-scale material destruction, and high numbers of casualties (Human

Rights Watch[HRW] 2001).

1

We argue that civilwars are collective experiences with

lasting psychological as well as social structural consequences that ‘‘significantly

modify what peopleknow or believe about each other, and therefore their perceptions

of who is trustworthy or reliable’’ (Cook, Hardin, and Levi 2005, 167). Moreover, the

occurrence of instances of violence gives rise to traumatizing experiences and pro-

vides people with clear evidence of the untrustworthiness, uncooperativeness, and

hostility of others. Combining both individual-level survey data and disaggregated

conflict data in a multilevel design, we test the impact of both individual war experi-

ences and municipal war exposure on social trust, which is generally viewed as the

expectation that other individuals will contribute to the well-being of a person or a

group, honor their commitments, and avoid harming others (Offe 1999).

Our results revealthat civil war is related to lower socialtrust in the postwar period,

however, that this effect proves to be more consistent for individual war experiences

than municipal-level war exposure. We find no indications of war having a positive

influence on socialtrust. This relationship at the individuallevel is remarkably robust

across multiplespecifications with different socioeconomiccontrols. However, due to

the cross-sectional nature of our data, we cannot truly uncover the causal mechanism

through which war-related violence affects social trust.

Our unique data allow us to make several important contributions to the under-

standing of how civil war affects social trust. First, by exploring ‘‘extremely scarce

micro survey data’’ (Bellows and Miguel 2009, 1145) from a postconflict context,

this study adds to two strands of the literature. On one hand, it extends the literature

on the legacies of civil war. Until recently, this strain of literature mainly empha-

sized the challenges for peacebuilding and economic development resulting from

718 Journal of Conflict Resolution 62(4)