Article The Conflict Trap Revisited: Civil Conflict and Educational Achievement

This article analyzes the association between civil conflicts and educational achievement by studying the Turkish case. It combines the 2005 university entrance exam scores of more than 1.6 million students and a newly constructed data set on the casualties of the Turkish–Kurdish conflict to study the association between the conflict and educational achievement of Turkish students. The results reveal a significant negative association. Combined with the already well-established positive links between education and various measures of socioeconomic development like economic growth, social equality, and public health, the results in this article demon-strate that education is one of the channels through which civil conflicts damage the well-being of societies thereby creating the conditions that perpetuate them. Keywords civil conflict, education Civil conflicts perpetuate themselves by changing in certain ways the societies expe-rience them. These conflicts pull societies into a ‘‘conflict trap’ ’ by destroying their economic development (Collier 1999; Collier et al. 2003), by crippling their political institutions and rendering them unable to address the underlying grievances (Collier et al. 2003; Wood 2008; Kibris 2012), and by damaging the ‘‘life chances’ ’ of thei