# **1 Introduction**

Armed conflict and political violence not only lead to tremendous human suffering, but also constitute a major blow to affected economies.<sup>1</sup> Hence, unsurprisingly, in the last decade economists have shown a booming interest in explaining the drivers of armed conflict. While this has led to an impressive body of knowledge, the lion’s share of results does not directly relate to policy interventions. There is also a notable scarcity of large-scale experimental evidence linking policy interventions and conflict, as discussed below. This is the gap in the literature that this paper addresses.

One striking fact is that civil conflicts have been predominantly concentrated in poorer countries in the post–World War II period (see, e.g., Fearon and Laitin 2003; Collier et al. 2009). While this association may not reflect causality, there is ample evidence that negative productivity shocks (typically measured by adverse climatic shocks) tend to fuel conflict (see, e.g., Miguel et al. 2004; Dell et al. 2014).

A natural idea, hence, is to reverse engineer productivity shocks and put in place policies to increase the earnings and welfare of the poor. Cash or in-kind transfers constitute one such type of policy instrument, particularly as they have been shown to facilitate human capital investments, induce asset accumulation, foster higher-productivity income-generating activities and reduce poverty (see, e.g. Fizsbein and Schady 2009; Alderman and Yemtsov 2014; Mill ́an et al. 2019; Kondylis and Loeser 2021; Banerjee et al. 2022). Although cash transfer programs do not typically have direct peacebuilding objectives, the idea that aid and transfers also necessarily foster peace is widespread in government agencies and public debates.<sup>2</sup> While even in the absence of pacifying benefits there remain plenty of powerful arguments for anti-poverty programs, an empirical investigation of the argument that they also contribute to peace is key. Indeed, the nexus between transfers and conflict or peace has a range of policy implications, including for security policies: if foreign aid curbs conflict, peacekeeping troops could eventually be redeployed, while if aid fuels conflict, this may call for a reinforcement of security in targeted areas.

To address the question of whether cash transfers foster peace, we study the impact on conflict of a large-scale, randomized government-led cash transfer program in Niger. The national cash transfer program (“Filets Sociaux”) was set up by the government of Niger to deliver unconditional cash transfers for two years through monthly payments. Yearly benefits amounted to about 11 percent of household consumption. The program has had well-documented positive impacts on its core objectives related to household consumption and food security, as well as asset accumulation, income-generating activities, and psychosocial well-being (see, e.g., Stoeffler et al. 2020; Bossuroy et al. 2022; Premand and Barry 2022; Premand and Stoeffler 2022). We leverage the randomization of treatment assignment among nearly 4,000 eligible villages to estimate the causal impact of these cash transfers on conflict events. Geo-referenced conflict events are obtained from the GDELT data set (Leetaru and Schrodt 2013), which draws on media and NGO reports from a wide variety of international and domestic sources (as discussed in more detail below).

We do not find that cash transfers contribute to foster peace, at least not in the short-to-medium run. If anything, treated villages experienced an increase in conflict events during program implementation. This increase was mostly driven

> 1Anderton and Brauer (2021) estimate 100 million mass-atrocity-related deaths since 1900. In terms of economic costs, Mueller and Tobias (2016) estimate an average drop in GDP of 18 percent after a civil war, with only a very slow economic recovery. Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003) find that terrorist conflict in the Basque country has led to a roughly 10 percent drop in GDP per capita compared to a synthetic control region.

> 2For instance, this manifests itself in the US “Food for Peace” program. Also see, e.g., “Japanese wage peace with talks and money, pleasing Asians,” _New York Times_ , 8 December 2002; “Entwicklungspolitik kann Frieden schaffen,” German Government, 9 April 2016; “Building a lasting peace and combatting fragilities,” French Government, January 2021.

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