Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/125541 
Year of Publication: 
2015
Series/Report no.: 
Working Paper No. 2015:1
Publisher: 
Uppsala University, Department of Economics, Uppsala
Abstract: 
How do political elites prepare the civilian population for participation in violent conflict? We empirically investigate this question using village-level data from the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. Every Saturday before 1994, Rwandan villagers had to meet to work on community infrastructure, a practice called Umuganda. This practice was highly politicized and, in the years before the genocide, regularly used for spreading political propaganda. To establish causality, we exploit cross-sectional variation in meeting intensity induced by exogenous weather fluctuations. We find that an additional rainy Saturday resulted in a five percent lower civilian participation rate in genocide violence. These results pass a number of indirect tests of the exclusion restriction as well as other robustness checks and placebo tests.
Subjects: 
Conflict
Rainfall
JEL: 
D74
N47
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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