The Conflict Trap Revisited

• Author: Arzu Kibris
• Published date: 01 June 2015
• Date: 01 June 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0022002713516845
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

The Conflict Trap

Revisited: Civil Conflict

and Educational

Achievement

Arzu Kibris

1

Abstract

This article analyzes the association between civil conflicts and educational

achievement by studying the Turkish case. It combines the 2005 university entrance

exam scores of more than 1.6 million students and a newly constructed data set on

the casualties of the Turkish–Kurdish conflict to study the association between the

conflict and educational achievement of Turkish students. The results reveal a

significant negative association. Combined with the already well-established positive

links between education and various measures of socioeconomic development like

economic growth, social equality, and public health, the results in this article demon-

strate that education is one of the channels through which civil conflicts damage the

well-being of societies thereby creating the conditions that perpetuate them.

Keywords

civil conflict, education

Civil conflicts perpetuate themselves by changing in certain ways the societies expe-

rience them. These conflicts pull societies into a ‘‘conflict trap’’ by destroying their

economic development (Collier 1999; Collier et al. 2003), by crippling their political

institutions and rendering them unable to address the underlying grievances (Collier

et al. 2003; Wood 2008; Kibris 2012), and by damaging the ‘‘life chances’’ of their

1

Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey

Corresponding Author:

Arzu Kibris, Sabanci University, Orhanli, Tuzla, Istanbul 34956, Turkey.

Email: akibris@sabanciuniv.edu

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2015, Vol. 59(4) 645-670

ªThe Author(s) 2014

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DOI: 10.1177/0022002713516845

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civilian populations (Hoeffler and Reynal-Querol 2003; Ghobarah, Huth, and

Russett 2003; Carlton-Ford and Boop 2010). In this article, I argue that a significant

part of this trap is created by the adverse effects of civil conflicts on education. I

empirically study the effects of the civil conflict in Turkey on the educational

achievement of Turkish high school students. The results reveal a significant nega-

tive impact, and thus demonstrate an important mechanism through which civil con-

flicts exert long-term damage on the well-being of host societies. Moreover,

combined with the well-established results in the literature on the positive associa-

tion between education and socioeconomic development, and on the negative asso-

ciation between development and civil conflicts, these results show that education is

an important channel through which civil conflicts perpetuate themselves.

This article is the first both to explore the effects of civil conflicts on educational

achievement and to empirically analyze how the Kurdish–Turkish ethnic conflict

that has been going on for twenty-nine years affected education in Turkey. I combine

two novel and interesting data sets to do so. The first data set consists of the test

scores of more than 1.6 million students who took the Turkish university entrance

exam Ogrenci Secme Sinavi (OSS) in 2005, along with information on the students’

gender, place of residency, and educational history including the high schools they

had attended and the classes they had taken (Alkan et al. 2008).

The second data set is composed of the date and place of death of nearly 7,000

Turkish security force casualties (SFC) that the conflict claimed between 1984 and

2012. I develop a measure of the severity of the conflict based on the number of these

casualties at the county level.

Relying on these two data sets, I study the impact of the conflict on the amount of

learning high school students achieve, which I measure by students’ test scores in the

university entrance exam. I construct a multilevel linear model to study the associ-

ation between the OSS scores of students and the severity of the armed conflict in

their county during their schooling period while controlling for a large number

of personal traits, for county-level socioeconomic conditions, and also for possible

unobserved school-specific, county-specific, and province-specific factors. The

results reveal a significant negative association between the armed conflict and

the educational achievement of students.

In the following section, I look into the literature on the effects of armed conflicts on

education, and into the literature on the association between education and socioeco-

nomic well-being of societies. In the third section, I present the Turkish case. In the fourth

section, I present my models and introduce my variables. The fifth section discusses the

data. I present my results in the sixth and, finally, present my conculusions in the seventh

section.

Education, Development, and Civil Conflict

Civil conflicts are humanitarian disasters. And unfortunately, the immediate suffer-

ings are only ‘‘the tip of the iceberg of their longer-term consequences for human

646 Journal of Conflict Resolution 59(4)