Aid, Attitudes, and Insurgency: Evidence from Development Projects in Northern Afghanistan
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".