Ce mémoire porte sur l’impact de la victoire des rebelles lors d’un conflit civil sur l’amélioration des conditions de vies des populations. Les conflits civils sont souvent déclenchés en raison des griefs sociaux, économiques et politiques que peuvent avoir la population et les groupes rebelles contre le gouvernement en place. Mais jusqu’ici, la littérature sur les conflits civils et plus précisément sur l’après-guerre ne nous a pas permis de savoir si, dans les cas où le groupe rebelle sort victorieux du conflit, celui-ci apporte une réponse positive aux griefs qui avaient été soulevés au début du conflit. Autrement dit, observe-t-on une amélioration des conditions socio-économiques des populations après cette victoire ? La recherche menée ici infirme notre hypothèse. Celle-ci stipulait que : le soutien populaire étant nécessaire la plupart du temps au succès d’un groupe rebelle, la légitimité ainsi acquise lui permettrait de gouverner de manière plus démocratique et juste qu’un gouvernement vainqueur et donc, d’apporter des améliorations aux conditions de vie de la population. Après une étude empirique dotée d’analyses de régression simple et multiple, par laquelle on compare plusieurs cas de conflits civils ayant débouché sur la victoire des rebelles et ceux ayant débouché sur la victoire des gouvernements, il en ressort que la victoire des rebelles ne conduit pas à une amélioration des conditions socio-économiques dans le pays. Au contraire, ces conditions se détériorent légèrement dans notre échantillon, tandis qu’on observe une amélioration dans les cas de victoire des gouvernements. Aussi, le mécanisme causal qui faisait donc du régime politique après le conflit une variable intermédiaire entre le résultat du conflit et les conditions socio-économiques, n’est pas confirmé. / This study is about the impact of the rebels’ victory in a civil conflict on improving the living conditions of the population. Civil conflicts are often triggered by social, economic, and political grievances that population and rebel groups may have against the government. However, so far, the literature on civil conflicts and more specifically, on the post-war period has not enabled us to know whether, in cases where the rebel group emerges victorious from the conflict, it provides a positive response to the grievances that had been raised at the start of the conflict. In other words, is there an improvement in the socio-economic conditions of the populations after this victory? The research carried out here refutes our hypothesis. We assume that popular support being necessary most of the time for the success of a rebel group, the legitimacy thus acquired will allow the rebel group to govern more democratically and fairly than a winning government and therefore to improve the living conditions of the population. After an empirical study with simple and multiple regression analysis, by which we compare several cases of civil conflicts, which led to rebel victory and those that led to government victory, it emerges that rebel victory does not lead to an improvement in socio-economic conditions. On the contrary, these conditions deteriorate slightly in our sample, while we observe an improvement in cases where the government is victorious. In addition, our explanatory mechanism, which made the post-conflict political regime an intermediate variable between the outcome of the conflict and socio-economic conditions, is not confirmed.

This thesis starts by arguing that the civil conflicts that erupted in the African Great Lakes are rooted in a continuous pursuit of power, in which ethnic, regional and political identifiers are used by the contenders for power to rally community support. In an introductory chapter, I go back to the colonial era, drawing attention to Burundi and Rwanda, and then describe in more details Burundi's refugee crisis, ex-combatants' demobilization and the 2010 elections, all of which will be addressed in the subsequent chapters. <p><p>In the second chapter, entitled "On the Instrumental Power of Refugees: Household Composition and Civil War in Burundi", I study changes in household composition following household's exposure to civil war in Burundi. The analyses rely on a panel dataset collected in rural Burundi in 2005 and 2010. To address concerns over the endogenous distribution violence, I use an instrumental variables strategy using the distance to refugee camps, in which the Hutu rebellion was organized from the mid-1990s onwards. The analysis focuses on the impact of violence on demographic changes within households.<p><p>The third chapter, entitled "Who Benefited from Burundi's Demobilization Program?" and co-authored with Olivier Sterck (University of Oxford) and Philip Verwimp (ULB), assesses the impact of the demobilization cash transfers program, which took place from 2004 onwards in post-war Burundi. In the short run, we find that the cash payments had a positive impact on beneficiaries' consumption, non-food spending and investments. Importantly, it also generated positive spillovers on civilians in their home villages. However, both the direct impact and the spillovers seem to vanish in the long run. Ex-combatants' investments in assets were not productive enough to sustain their consumption pattern in the long run, as they ultimately ran out of demobilization money. <p><p>In the fourth chapter, entitled "From Rebellion to Electoral Violence. Evidence from Burundi" and co-authored with Andrea Colombo (ULB) and Olivier Sterck (University of Oxford), we aim at understanding the triggers of electoral violence in 2010, only a few months after the end of the war. We find that an acute polarization between ex-rebel groups -capturing the presence of groups with equal support - and political competition are both highly conducive to electoral violence. Disaggregating electoral violence by type, we show that these drivers explain different types of violence. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that ethnic diversity is not associated with electoral violence in post-conflict Burundi. <p><p>In the last chapter, entitled "Who Benefits from Customary Justice? Rent-seeking, Bribery and Criminality in sub-Saharan Africa" and co-authored with Olivier Sterck (University of Oxford), we have a closer look at the judicial system of Uganda, an important institution in a post-conflict economy. In many African countries, customary and statutory judicial systems co-exist. Customary justice is exercised by local courts and based on restorative principles, while statutory justice is mostly retributive and administered by magistrates' courts. As their jurisdiction often overlaps, victims can choose which judicial system to refer to, which may lead to contradictions between rules and inconsistencies in judgments. In this essay, we construct a model representing a dual judicial system and we show that this overlap encourages rent-seeking and bribery, and yields to high rates of petty crimes and civil disputes. <p><p>In Burundi, history has shown that instability in one country of the Great Lake region may destabilize the whole area, with dramatic effect on civilian population. Understanding the dynamics laying at the origin of violence, during and after civil conflict, is crucial to prevent violence relapse in any form, from petty criminality to larger scale combats. <p> / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Le point de départ des travaux entrepris est la définition lefortienne de la démocratie par opposition au totalitarisme. Le totalitarisme est l’institution d’une société organique, une et homogène, dans laquelle aucune division sociale, aucun désaccord avec l’idéologie véhiculée par le parti ne sont possibles. La spécificité de la démocratie, a contrario, est de s’enrichir de la désintrication du pouvoir, du droit, et du savoir. Les citoyens, dotés de droits fondamentaux, sont juges de la légitimité du pouvoir établi. Leurs désaccords ainsi que l’antagonisme entre les classes sociales nourrissent l’exercice d’un commun litigieux. De là, une question fondamentale : une telle définition de la démocratie est-elle historiquement datée, ou continue-t-elle d’être pertinente aujourd’hui ? Doit-on encore concevoir la démocratie, pour la rendre authentique, par le conflit civil érigé en principe politique, ou faut-il l’envisager de manière consensualiste au lendemain de son opposition avec le totalitarisme ? Claude Lefort s’inspirait de Machiavel pour dépasser les limites du marxisme et repenser la démocratie par la valorisation du conflit civil, indissociable de la figure de l’imaginaire social. La thèse ici soutenue adopte différemment une perspective néo-machiavélienne. Elle revient à proposer un espace public dissensuel à partir du modèle machiavélien de l’entente dans le conflit, par confrontation avec l’espace public habermassien et d’autres conceptions du tort et du conflit dans les démocraties contemporaines. Comment concevoir aujourd’hui les figures du conflit civil et de l’imaginaire social, en s’inspirant paradoxalement de Machiavel pour interroger la démocratie ? / The starting point of the present work is the Lefortian definition of democracy as opposed to totalitarism. Totalitarism is the institution of an organic society, one and homogeneous, where no social division, no disagreement with the party’s ideology are possible. On the contrary democracy’s specificity consists in enriching itself with the disentanglement of power, law and knowledge. Citizens, endowed with fundamental rights can judge of the legitimacy of the power in place. Their disagreements as well as the antagonism between social classes fuel the dispute about common good.Hence a fundamental question: is such a definition of democracy historically dated or is it still relevant today? To make it authentic should democracy be seen through civil conflict made into a political principle or should it be viewed in a consensualist way just after its opposition to totalitarism? Claude Lefort drew from Machiavelli to go beyond the limits of Marxism and rethink democracy by giving more importance to civil conflict as an integral part of the theme of social imaginary. The present dissertation adopts in a different way a neo-Machiavellian perspective. It amounts to proposing a dissensual public space on the Machiavellian model of understanding within conflict by confronting it with the Habermassian public space and with other conceptions of wrong and conflict in contemporary democracies.Today how can the themes of civil conflict and social imaginary be viewed – paradoxically drawing from Machiavelli- to question democracy?

Cette thèse propose une analyse de certaines des politiques considérées actuellement comme étant des éléments-clé de toute stratégie de développement, avec l’objectif de contribuer au récent débat sur le développement international. Je considère en particulier l’élaboration, la mise en oeuvre et l’évaluation des politiques de protection sociale, de développement participatif et d’intégration régionale. Le premier chapitre repose sur l’idée que, pour être efficaces en matière de réduction de la pauvreté, les politiques de protection sociale doivent avoir pour double objectif de permettre aux ménages pauvres d’accéder à des ressources suffisantes pour satisfaire leurs besoins de base, ainsi que de réduire le risque auquel les ménages non pauvres sont confrontés de voir leur niveau de bien-être diminuer sous le seuil de pauvreté. Je propose une méthode permettant d’estimer le degré de vulnérabilité à la pauvreté des ménages. La vulnérabilité est ici définie comme la probabilité pour un ménage de se trouver sous le seuil de pauvreté dans le futur, étant données ses caractéristiques actuelles. Dans le second chapitre, je me place dans un contexte de ciblage des programmes de protection sociale par un score approximant le niveau de vie (proxy-means testing). La précision, et donc l’efficacité, de cette approche pour identifier les ménages pauvres dépendent de la capacité à prédire avec exactitude le niveau de bien-être des ménages, laquelle découle de la sélection de variables pertinentes. Je propose une méthode basée sur l’estimation d’un échantillon aléatoire de modèles de consommation, pour identifier les variables dont la corrélation avec le bien-être des ménages est à la fois élevée et robuste. Ces variables appartiennent à différentes catégories, y compris la possession de biens durables, l’accès aux services d’énergie domestique et d’assainissement, la qualité et le statut d’occupation du logement, et le niveau d’éducation des membres du ménage. Les troisième et quatrième chapitres de cette thèse proposent une analyse ex-post des politiques de développement, et portent en particulier sur les conséquences inattendues d’un programme de développement participatif et les raisons de l’insuffisante performance de politiques d’intégration régionale, respectivement. Le troisième chapitre évalue dans quelle mesure la réaction des deux groupes rebelles présents aux Philippines face à la mise en oeuvre d’un programme participatif d’aide au développement est compatible avec l’idée que ces deux groupes ont différentes idéologies, caractéristiques et raisons pour lutter contre le gouvernement. Il utilise une base de données collectées en utilisant les reportages d’un journal local concernant les épisodes de guerre impliquant ces deux groupes, ainsi que les prédictions d’un modèle d’insurrection basé sur la recherche de rente (rent-seeking). Les résultats sont conformes à la classification proposée de ces deux groupes rebelles ; leur réaction face au projet dépend de leur position idéologique. Le dernier chapitre analyse l’impact des guerres civiles en Afrique sur la performance des communautés économiques régionales, approximée par la synchronisation des cycles économiques des différents partenaires régionaux. Les résultats montrent que la synchronisation des cycles économiques diminue avec l’occurrence de guerres civiles, non seulement pour les pays directement affectés, mais également pour leurs voisins en paix. / In this thesis, I aim to contribute to the recent international development debate, by providing an analysis of some of the policies that are considered key elements of a development strategy. Focusing on social protection, community-based development and regional integration, I consider aspects related to their design, implementation and evaluation. In the first chapter, I propose a method to estimate ex ante vulnerability to poverty, defined as the probability of being poor in the near future given one’s current characteristics. This is based on the premise that effective social protection policies should aim not only to help the poor move out of poverty, but also to protect the vulnerable from falling into it. In the second chapter, I consider the issue of identifying the poor in a context of targeting social protection programs using a Proxy-Means Testing (PMT) approach, which precision, and therefore usefulness relies on the selection of indicators that produce accurate predictions of household welfare. I propose a method based on model random sampling to identify indicators that are robustly and strongly correlated with household welfare, measured by per capita consumption. These indicators span the categories of household private asset holdings, access to basic domestic energy, education level, sanitation and housing. The third and fourth chapters of this thesis provide an ex-post analysis of development policies and focus in particular on the unintended consequences of a community-driven program and on the reasons for the lack of progress in regional economic integration. The third chapter assesses whether the reaction of the two distinct rebel groups that operate in the Philippines to the implementation of a large-scale community-driven development project funded by foreign aid is consistent with the idea that these two groups have different ideologies, characteristics and motives for fighting. It is based on a unique geo-referenced dataset that we collected from local newspaper reports on the occurrence of conflict episodes involving these rebel groups, and on the predictions of a rent-seeking model of insurgency. The findings are consistent with the proposed classification of the rebel groups; the impact of the foreign aid project on each rebel group depends on their ideological stance. In the last chapter, I analyze how civil conflicts affect the economic fate of African regional economic communities through its effect on the synchronicity of regional partners’ economies. I find that conflict decreases business cycle synchronicity when it occurs within a regional economic community, both for the directly affected countries and for their more peaceful regional peers.

Foreign aid has been used on the one hand by donors as an important international relations policy tool and on the other hand by developing countries as a source of funds for development. Since its inception in the 1940s, foreign aid has been one of the most researched topics in development economics. This study adds to this growing aid effectiveness literature, with a particular focus on the under-researched relationship between foreign aid and extreme poverty. The main empirical assessment is based on a sample of 120 developing countries from 1981 to 2013. The study had two main objectives, namely: (i) to estimate the impact of foreign aid on poverty reduction and (ii) to examine the direction of causality between foreign aid and poverty in developing countries. From these two broad objectives, there are six specific objectives, which include to: (i) examine the overall impact of foreign aid (total official development assistance) on extreme poverty, (ii) investigate the impact of different proxies of foreign aid on the three proxies of extreme poverty, (iii) assess whether political freedom (democracy) or economic freedom enhances the effectiveness of foreign aid, (iv) compare the impact of foreign aid on extreme poverty by developing country income groups, and (v) examine the direction of causality between extreme poverty and foreign aid. To achieve these objectives, the study employed two main dynamic panel data econometric estimation methods, namely the systemgeneralised method of moments (SGMM) technique and the panel vector error correction model (VECM) Granger causality framework. While the SGMM was used to assess the impact of foreign aid on extreme poverty, the panel VECM Granger causality was used to examine the direction of causality between foreign aid poverty. The SGMM was used because of its ability to deal with endogeneity by controlling for simultaneity and unobserved heterogeneity, whereas the panel VECM was preferred because the variables were stationary and cointegrated. / Economics / D. Phil. (Economics)