The Consequences of Child Soldiering Christopher Blattman September 2006 JOB MARKET PAPER Abstract Reintegration of Africa s millions of young ex combatants is one of the continent s most crucial development and peace building concerns Any impacts of war on the skills and productivity of so many young people could impede growth for decades Moreover any impact on aggression and social exclusion could imperil peace This paper presents new survey data collected by the author in northern Uganda where near random variation in rebel recruitment practices allows important questions to be answered namely who is affected by combat in what ways and how much Ugandan rebels have abducted thousands of youth mostly adolescents to serve in their insurgency This paper identifies eight rural areas where abduction was large scale indiscriminate and exogenous to a youth s individual traits After demonstrating this unconfoundedness of abduction the paper shows that the most pervasive impact of combat is upon their education and productivity Contrary to popular belief social and political exclusion appear no greater among ex combatants Moreover psychological health and aggression are adversely affected by combat experiences but predominantly in a minority The paper takes an instrumental variables approach to show that extreme war violence not abduction can account for the concentrated psychological distress we observe in both child and adult ex fighters Finally by all of measures the paper shows child soldiers to be at least as resilient as young adult ones Implications for post conflict reintegration development and peace building in northern Uganda are discussed Acknowledgements I first and foremost want to acknowledge Jeannie Annan my co Investigator on the Survey for War Affected Youth SWAY For comments and advice I thank David Albouy Barry Eichengreen Chang Tai Hsieh Macartan Humphreys Guido Imbens David Lee David Leonard David Lynch Matias Cattaneo Edward Miguel Gerard Roland Jeremy Weinstein and participants at the UC Berkeley Development and Labor lunches SWAY would not have succeeded without our survey managers Roger Horton and Okot Godfrey as well as our excellent field Research Assistants Logistical administrative and security support were supplied by AVSI Uganda and UNICEF Uganda Military escorts were provided by the Uganda People s Defense Force The survey was funded by grants from UNICEF Uganda via AVSI Uganda the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation via the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center the Russell Sage Foundation the International Peace Research Association Foundation the UC Berkeley Center for African Studies the UC Berkeley Institute for Economic and Business Research and Indiana University s Graduate School Finally the writing of this paper was supported by a Peace Scholar award from the United States Institute of Peace a Doctoral Fellowship Award from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and a Dissertation Award from the Academic Council on the United Nations System The views expressed herein are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the granting and funding agencies Christopher Blattman 549 Evans Hall 3880 Department of Economics University of California Berkeley CA 94720 3880 USA blattman berkeley edu 1 510 207 6352 1 Introduction Death destruction of capital and political instability are the most obvious and studied costs of war The purpose of this paper is to move to a more micro level assessment of the consequences of conflict demonstrating that the long term impact of combat and violence on surviving youth is at least as critical a development and peace building concern Moreover the paper aims to show that in the near absence of micro data the impacts of war on youth may have been misconstrued the economic consequences greatly underestimated and the vulnerability of child combatants overestimated Child and adult ex combatants number in the millions Two thirds of African nations have suffered civil warfare since the end of the Cold War with most of these conflicts lasting for seven years or longer Marshall and Gurr 2005 These civil wars are typically brutal and all consuming affairs pulling up to a third of male youth into combat including children Children under 18 were believed to be serving in 72 government or rebel armed forces in about 20 countries as of 2002 Achverina and Reich 2006 CSUCS 2005 The millions of other ex combatants 114 armed conflicts have been recorded since 1990 are of course little older than children themselves 1 Almost nothing is known however about the lasting impacts of military recruitment and war violence on youth While the impacts are undoubtedly harmful we cannot say with any certainty who is affected in what ways or how much As a consequence post conflict reintegration programs for young ex combatants are designed and targeted in a largely ad hoc manner a state of affairs government and aid workers on the ground are the first to lament Yet improving reintegration success is a crucial development and peace building concern Human capital takes decades to accumulate and with so many young ex combatants any damage to health or interruption of education could hinder the performance and productivity of the entire nation for many years to come Moreover any impact of war on aggression or social exclusion could threaten the long term political stability of the nation Which impacts of combat are most salient and in need of attention however is essentially unknown One reason that the effects of combat are so poorly understood is the paucity of data in war zones Another is the challenge of causal inference in the presence of sample selection ex fighters are usually a select segment of the population including those who chose to join those screened by the armed group and those that remain to tell the tale A final challenge is the heterogeneity of the 1 Calculated from the 2005 UCDP PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset UCDP PRIO 2006 Gleditsch et al 2002 1 experience itself the length and intensity of combat varies dramatically across youth possibly in ways that are influenced by the youth s unobserved traits This paper tackles all three challenges First the paper uses an original survey of youth embroiled in civil war to overcome the usual lack of data in conflict situations More than 1000 households and 741 male youth including 462 excombatants were interviewed by the author a psychologist and a team of local assistants in