The industrial organization of the Lord's Resistance Army
This paper by Chris Blattman makes for grim reading.
We investigate one of the world’s most pernicious forms of exploitation: child soldiering. Most theories can be captured by a principal-agent model that incorporates punishments, indoctrination, and age-varying productivity. For rebel leaders, we show it is almost always optimal to coerce rather than re- ward children, and that leaders will tend to forcibly recruit children when punishment and supervision are cheap, when children’s outside options are poor, and when rebel leaders are resource-constrained. To see which mechanisms dominate in practice, we interview and survey former members of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army, who provide a cruel natural experiment that reveals how children and adults respond to coercive incentives. The evidence suggests that children are more easily indoctrinated and disoriented than adults, but are less effective guerrillas; hence the optimal targets of coercion are young adolescents. We confirm predications of the model on a new “cross-rebel” dataset and suggest policy solutions.
Comments
I liked the paper (if like is the right word), but in line with recent discussions—of methods, the NSF, and the quantification of political science—this seems like an awful lot of work to demonstrate a rather obvious argument, with “counterintuitive” policy recommendations that derive directly from an existing program.
Posted by: LS | January 25, 2010 11:14 AM