Consequences of Terrorism: The Effects of Terrorism on Education in Sri Lanka

This study aims to analyze the impact of terrorism on the educational sector of Sri Lanka. We focus our attention on Eelam War IV, the final phase of the 26-yearlong Sri Lankan conflict and the period of peace (period under the Norwegian government mediated ceasefire agreement) prior to it. We use data from the 2012 National Population and Housing Census and war related fatality counts from the South Asia Terrorism Portal to divide the island’s 9 provinces into high and low war intensity provinces in order to analyze the impact of terrorism on the educational attainment of individuals residing in each of these provinces during the two periods; peace and war. We use an Ordinary Least Squares Model to estimate the average years of schooling and a Logit Model to estimate the levels of individual grade completion. Our results find that the conflict did not have a diminishing impact on education, in fact educational outcomes for individual grade completion increased during the conflict period in areas deemed highly intense