No dia 11 de abril, Pedro Vicente (NOVA School of Business and Economics) será o orador convidado do Seminário do Grupo SPARC a decorrer pelas 14h30 na Sala 2 do ICS-ULisboa e online. O tema para esta sessão será Reaching to the People: Conflict Prevention in Resource-rich Mozambique.

In this seminar we will discuss conflict prevention in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique, guided by a sequence of experimental and quasi-experimental studies. In the first study (Armand, Coutts, Vicente, and Vilela, 2020) we analyze the impact of an information campaign on the management of natural resources and find that the campaign reduced conflict around treated villages in the first year of the insurgency, possibly through mobilization of communities. In the second study (Vicente and Vilela, 2022) we assess the impact of religious sensitization against violence in mosques and find that it reduced antisocial behavior as measured in a lab-in-the-field game. Finally, we report on a third study (Armand, Vicente, and Vilela, 2024) that follows a radio campaign based on religious sensitization against violence and find that it reduced violence but increased fear in the population. Reaching to the people with information and involving local organizations, namely those representing the Muslim community, could be an effective conflict-prevention strategy in Cabo Delgado.

Pedro C. Vicente is a Full Professor of Economics at Nova School of Business and Economics (Nova SBE), where he is also the founding scientific director of the knowledge center NOVAFRICA. He specializes in development economics and Africa, with a focus on political economy issues. Previously to Nova SBE, Pedro Vicente was a professor and researcher at the University of Oxford and Trinity College Dublin. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame and a consultant to the World Bank. Pedro Vicente has published in leading economics journals such as the American Economic Review, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Economic Journal, and the Journal of Development Economics. His research has entailed substantial fieldwork efforts in African countries including Mozambique, Nigeria, Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe, as well as funding by national and international agencies such as DFID, USAID, 3IE, IZA, and FCT. Pedro Vicente has a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.