In addition, there is some indication of a positive pre-trend in violence before the completion of roads. Remember that we matched observations by the UCDP violence risk in period -1. What we, therefore, find here is that treated cells might have suffered a slight escalation of violence before road completion. What could explain this? Armed forces brought in by the government or UN to secure a project perimeter may meet armed resistance or engage in violent wealth extraction to finance their deployment. It may also be that the roadworks attracted attempts of resistance by local armed actors or that the rents that the project brought led to fights. Impending roadworks may also turn stationary bandits roving, i.e. disturb entrenched and predictable armed group revenue generation strategies such as roadblocks, leading to violent transitioning to alternative forms of wealth extraction (see (Schouten et al. 2022)). According to _ibid_ and expert interviews, it is also true that road project announcements often lead to land grabbing in the area. This might cause violence to increase before the actual start of the project. However, the timing here is important - road projects usually go on for several years, and the sudden increase of violence before completion is not consistent with land grabbing at the start of the project. An alternative interpretation is that violence is causally linked to the government showing its strength with the increased connectivity.

# **5 Robustness Checks and Potential Channels**

## **5.1 Different Types of Violence**

In the previous regressions, we only focused on the total number of events and fatalities. However, such aggregates cover very different types of violent events, and some of them, like protests, are not the focus of this paper. We, therefore, run the OLS regressions again using different subsets of violent events. Different measures of violence as dependent variables either in sensitivity tests or in order to shed light on potential channels of causation have been used (Besley and Persson 2011; Bazzi and Blattman 2014; Harari and Ferrara 2018; McGuirk and Burke 2020). Using UCDP data, we focus on (1) one-sided and (2) nonstate violence. One-sided violence is defined as ”the deliberate use of armed force by the government of a state or by a formally organized group against civilians which results in at least 25 deaths in a year”. A non-state conflict is defined as “the use of armed force between two organized armed groups, neither of which is the government of a state, which results in at least 25 battle-related deaths in a year”. Using ACLED data, we focus on violence against civilians and battles. Violence against civilians includes sexual violence, attack, and abduction/forced disappearance. Battles include events when the government regains territory, when a non-state actor overtakes territory, and when armed clashes occur.

First, we get strong and robust findings on the relationship between road projects and violence targeting civilians using one-sided violence in UCDP and violence against civilians in ACLED. While the two sources are quite different in the way they define violence against civilians, the estimates are similar and show that the reduction of violence associated with 24