Abstract Does development assistance reduce violence in conflict zones? The case of Afghanistan strongly informs the scholarly literature on this. However, existing empirical frameworks are not grounded in theories of insurgent mobility and, as a result, fail to examine the downstream effects of development assistance projects. I propose that Afghanistan's environment created incentives for insurgents to project violence from rural areas into nearby urban centers, necessitating rural development assistance to disrupt urban violence. Using Asia Foundation Afghanistan survey data from districts with both urban and rural populations, aggregated to the province-year level, I find that projects targeting rural areas were associated with reduced violence downstream in nearby urban areas, whereas urban development assistance did not significantly impact levels of urban violence. These findings suggest development assistance may only reduce violence when projects are situated near areas of insurgent support, and the reduction in violence may only be evident when empirical models enable estimating downstream effects.
Andrew Joseph Glubzinski (Thu,) studied this question.
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