Identity and conflict: Evidence from Tuareg rebellion in Mali

• Published in: World development 2023-01, Vol.161, p.106108, Article 106108
• Main Authors: Ananyev, Maxim, Poyker, Michael
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Conflict; National identity; West Africa
• ISSN: 0305-750X; 1873-5991
• DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2022.106108

•Social scientists recognize that people’s sense of belonging to a political nation is important for the society’s peace and prosperity. Our research explores why in some places that sense of belonging (called “national identity”) is lower than in others.•We demonstrate, using data from Mali, a multi-ethnic West African state, that suffered from the sudden urgency, prompted by NATO involvement in Libya, that people who lived closer to the conflict zone lost their sense of national identity as compared to people who lived further from the conflict zone.•We interpret these findings in the context of modern theories of identity. Since the state became visibly weaker because of internal insurgency, association with it became less important for the citizens, while the ethnic identities increased in salience. Does internal conflict erode national identity in Sub-Saharan Africa? We explore this question in the context of the 2012 Tuareg rebellion in Mali. The timing of the conflict was plausibly exogenous: the fall of al-Gaddafi’s regime in Libya in 2011 triggered the return of the Tuareg fighters from the demised leader’s Praetorian guard to their homeland in Northern Mali. Using representative survey data on the salience of national and ethnic identities, we perform a difference-in-differences estimation and find that the outbreak of the conflict prompted Malian residents living closer to the conflict zone to decrease their national identity more than the residents further away. We argue that this effect is likely to have been driven by proximity to violent events perpetrated by separatist groups and not by selective migration, exposure to internally displaced persons, communal violence, or other potential alternative explanations. Our results are consistent with the qualitative evidence on the matter. We place these findings in the context of recent theoretical advances in identity economics.