Aid, Attitudes, and Insurgency: Evidence from Development Projects in Northern Afghanistan
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Prevalent counterinsurgency theories posit that small development aid projects can help stabilize regions in conflict. A widely assumed mechanism runs through citizen attitudes, often called “winning hearts and minds,” where aid brings economic benefits and sways public perceptions, leading to more cooperation and, eventually, less violence. Following a preregistered research design, we test this claim using difference‐in‐differences, leveraging original survey data, and new geocoded information about infrastructure projects in northern Afghanistan. We find that aid improves perceived economic conditions but erodes attitudes toward government and improves perceptions of insurgents. These attitudinal effects do not translate into changes in violence or territorial control. Testing mechanisms, we find projects with robust local consultation have fewer negative attitudinal effects, as do health and education projects. These findings challenge the “hearts and minds” theory but complement the wider literature on legitimacy, suggesting that foreign aid can improve human development but rarely meaningfully brings political stabilization.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it