Date & Time: Bath (5 pm), Munich (6 pm), Los Angeles (9 am), Cincinnati (12 pm), Singapore (March 31, 12 am), Beijing (March 31, 12 am), Sydney (March 31, 3 am)

Victoire Girard will present the paper titled "Sexual violence as a weapon of war" (joint work with Maleke Fourati and Jeremy Laurent-Lucchetti).

Abstract of the Paper:
We show that armed groups perpetrate sexual violence against civilians in response to local economic shocks. We combine new data on resources and sexual violence in a fine-grained panel of cells covering Africa from 1997 to 2018. We find that a one standard deviation increase in the gold price increases sexual violence in mining areas by two-thirds of the sample mean. Importantly, the effect is concentrated around artisanal operations – a labor-intensive resource that is easy to conceal. In contrast, local resources which are capital-intensive, or which production is hard to conceal, have no relationship with sexual violence. Based on a theoretical discussion, we demonstrate how standard rationales of violence as a taxation strategy may explain these findings. We show that we can generalize the analysis to the effect of resources on other forms of non-lethal and lethal violence against civilians. Furthermore, we document that artisanal mining value increases sexual violence mostly in the presence of the armed groups who are the most likely to rely on illegal local taxation, namely, rebel groups. We conclude by discussing how our approach is complementary to the cultural or institutional drivers of sexual violence at the core of the existing literature. Accounting for these drivers, economic shocks remain a powerful predictor of sexual violence.

Chair: Subhasish Chowdhury, Co-Chair: Kai A. Konrad