This land is my land! Large-Scale Land Acquisitions and conflict events in Sub-Saharan Africa

Through a spatially disaggregated approach to account for local characteristics and a quasi-experimental research design to overcome limitations due to missing georeferentiated information about land deals, we provide sound evidence that large-scale land acquisitions raise the likelihood of experiencing outbursts of organized violence, especially when oriented against civilians. The most striking result is that domestic acquisitions are particularly significant in explaining organized violence outbreak, suggesting that national concentration of power among elites matters for social stability. Extractive resources are found significant predictors of organized violence, confirming their role in the political economy of conflict events. Finally, results show the existence of significant spatio-temporal dependence path, since events of organized violence tend to be recurrent and to persist in space, feeding “neighbouring” effects of proximity and local patterns of violence concentration.