Legacies of war: How Violence Shapes Post-conflict Life.

One frequent purpose of violence in civil war is to deepen the cleavage between sides so that reconciliation between them becomes unthinkable. However, little empirical evidence exists about the extent to which this strategy is successful in practice. While there is some evidence that the experience of trauma during war has important consequences for post-conflict political and social life, we know little about whether or how different kinds of violence have different kinds of post-conflict effects. This paper takes another step in understanding the consequences of war by examining the different effects of different kinds of wartime trauma. Using a unique household-level dataset from post-conflict Aceh, Indonesia, I identify three different categories of wartime trauma: the death or disappearance of a friend or loved one, economic loss, and displacement with or without return to the home of origin. I then examine similarities and differences in how these different kinds of trauma affect the way people participate in post-conflict social and political life. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]