Quotidian crime, wartime violence and public goods preferences: Evidence from Liberia
| Published date | 01 July 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00223433231155281 |
| Author | Sarah Berens,Sabrina Karim |
| Date | 01 July 2024 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433231155281
Journal of Peace Research
2024, Vol. 61(4) 545 –559
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/00223433231155281
journals.sagepub.com/home/jpr
1225162JPR0010.1177/00223433231155281Journal of Peace ResearchBerens & Karim
research-article2023
Regular Article
Quotidian crime, wartime violence and public
goods preferences: Evidence from Liberia
Sarah Berens
University of Innsbruck
Sabrina Karim
Cornell University
Abstract
Much of the literature on victimization looks at the effect of organized violence (OV) on civilian perceptions and
behaviour. Yet citizens in countries experience quotidian crime (QC) on a daily basis. QC differs from OV, the
former being more isolated, while the latter is more of a collective experience. As such we develop a theoretical
framework that explores the effects of both types of violence on preferences for public goods. Victims of OV may
prefer welfare public goods for the entire community, whereas victims of QC may prefer security for themselves. We
also test the effects of compound victimization on public goods’ preferences. We use original survey data from rural
Liberia to test our hypotheses and find support for our argument. Our results show the importance of a disaggregated
approach to understanding the effects of violence on preferences.
Keywords
conflict, crime victimization, Liberia, organized violence, public goods preferences
Introduction
In a village in Liberia, a woman complains to the village
elders about her husband beating her. In the same village,
the village elders hear complaints about a thief who has been
stealing goats from different farms, and they hear about a
fight that broke out between neighbours who were quarrel-
ling over property lines.
1
These ‘petty’ or everyday crimes –
what we call quotidian crime (QC) (Lake, 2022) – are
typical of any society and they stand in contrast to organized
criminal violence (Barnes, 2017; Nussio, 2019) and wartime
victimization (Carpenter, 2005; Valentino, 2014).
The literature largely focuses on the effects of victimiza-
tion from organized violence (OV) – violence exerted by a
group, be that a drug cartel or a rebel group. While support
for democracy and interpersonal trust decrease after the
experience of violence (Fernandez & Kuenzi, 2010; Car-
reras & Bowler, 2019), apart from a few exceptions (Ley,
2018), the consensus of this literature is that victimization
leads to increased political participation (Bellows &
Miguel, 2009; Bateson, 2012; Dorff, 2017; Berens &
Dallendo
¨rfer, 2019), increased pro-sociality and collective
action (Bellows & Miguel, 2009; Balcells, 2012; Voors
et al., 2012; Gilligan, Pasquale & Samii, 2013; Beber,
Roessler & Scacco, 2014; Bauer et al., 2016). Only one
study distinguishes quotidian, or what the author calls
‘common delinquency,’ from wartime violence quotidian,
or what the author calls ‘common delinquency,’ from war-
time violence in Colombia and finds that conflict and
crime victims show elevated levels of participation in social
organizations (Nussio, 2019).
We argue that quotidian violence and OV differ when it
comes to the perpetrator, target, motive and severity of the
violence. These differences in victimization lead to variation
in preferences for public goods for the individual or for the
community. Different types of victimization may thus shift
priorities over the type of public good the state provides.
Corresponding author:
sarah.berens@uibk.ac.at
1
These are examples of actual incidents that occurred during one of
the author’s field visits.
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