Abstract
Although non-political violence carried by terrorist groups is critical to the financing of such organizations, these actions are often ignored or confounded with ordinary crime, and thus their wider political scope remains overlooked. However, early action in favor of civilian security might avoid uncontrollable situations of protracted insecurity. In this study, by drawing on the case of the 2015 Boko Haram insurgency in Chad, we disentangle the effect of terrorist groups' political actions from ordinary crime. We show that the initial Boko Haram non-political criminal activities confined to the Lac region during 2013-2015 caused sizable detrimental effects to the civilian population. We test this hypothesis by looking at child anthropometrics exploiting four rounds of harmonized cross-sectional DHS and MICS microdata collected before (1997, 2000, and 2010) and after (2015) the Boko Haram insurgency in the country, but not during its political violence phase. We find that Boko Haram is responsible for a 0.32 and 0.23 lower weight-for-height and BMI-z scores. These results are supported by additional evidence linking Boko Haram with worse household diet diversity and impaired agricultural activity.
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Organisation
Raya Muttarak