"Four dozen papers on conflict and fragility in Africa in under 2,000 words"

David Evans' coverage of last month's Annual Bank Conference on Africa is a great overview of some fascinating recent applied research. Highlights:

Extreme rain and drought both boost livestock theft in Kenya: raids driven by resource scarcity but also by weather that makes it easy to carry out a raid (Ralston).

Drought leads to increased violence against women. When the shock affects income asymmetrically across partners, it is associated with violence for the first time in the marriage (Cools et al.). 

Axbard et al. use variation in international mineral prices and within-country time and geographic variation to show that when a mine opens in South Africa, crime doesn’t increase. But you may not want to be around when the mine closes. 

“Members of ethnic groups exposed to greater historical missionary activity [in 19th-century Nigeria] express significantly less trust today,” using Afrobarometer trust measures (Okoye).