In the early 2000s, the Colombian government aired messages during games of the national football team, urging FARC rebels to demobilize. We first study the strategy's effectiveness, leveraging game dates, kick-off times, and spatial-temporal variation in rain-induced signal strength in a municipality-day-level panel spanning 2003-2016. Over 1,000 rebels demobilized because of family-themed (but not national-unity-themed) messages, received during unexpected losses (i.e., negative emotional cues). We then model a rebel's demobilization decision, combining identity salience with their emotional state. Finally, we corroborate the model's predictions examining family- versus non-family-specific holidays and local climatic anomalies.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.