Why do some towns recover faster than others after intrastate conflict? Many important decisions about post-conflict recovery are made at the substate level, but little empirical work has investigated what causes differences in recovery outcomes within a country. This article suggests that proximity to ethno-religiously diverse neighbors slows a town’s post-conflict recovery. A town has ‘diverse neighbors’ if towns with different plurality ethno-religious groups are nearby. This hypothesis is tested by exploring variation in recovery speed among Iraqi towns after the 2014–17 Islamic State insurgency (ISIL). The article constructs 81-month panels of economic activity for 379 Iraqi settlements occupied by ISIL by using satellite-observed nighttime light emissions as a proxy for economic activity. The panels reveal large variation in post-conflict recovery among towns during the first year of peace. Village-level survey data are then used to construct a measure of neighbor diversity, which is combined with lighting-based recovery scores in spatial autoregression. The results show that greater neighbor diversity is robustly associated with slower settlement recovery. The neighbor diversity penalty cannot be fully explained by cleavages between groups ‘on opposite sides’ of the conflict; proximity to out-group neighbors appears to slow recovery even between wartime allies. Several explanations are considered, and this article suggests that the types of post-liberation controllers that arise in diverse areas – which tend to be substate militias rather than the government – may be one important mechanism.

为什么有些城镇在州内冲突后恢复得比其他城镇快？许多关于冲突后恢复的重要决定都是在州一级做出的，但很少有实证工作调查导致内部恢复结果差异的原因。一个国家。这篇文章表明，靠近具有不同民族宗教信仰的邻居会减缓城镇冲突后的恢复。如果附近有不同种族宗教团体的城镇，那么城镇就有“不同的邻居”。该假设通过探索 2014-17 年伊斯兰国叛乱 (ISIL) 后伊拉克城镇恢复速度的变化来检验。本文使用卫星观测的夜间光发射作为经济活动的代理，为伊黎伊斯兰国占领的 379 个伊拉克定居点构建了为期 81 个月的经济活动面板。面板显示，在和平的第一年，城镇之间的冲突后恢复差异很大。然后使用村级调查数据来构建邻居多样性的度量，该度量与空间自回归中基于照明的恢复分数相结合。结果表明，更大的邻居多样性与较慢的定居点恢复密切相关。邻居多样性惩罚不能完全用冲突“对立面”的群体之间的分裂来解释；即使在战时盟友之间，与异族邻居的接近似乎也会减慢恢复速度。考虑了几种解释，本文认为在不同地区出现的解放后控制者的类型——往往是次国家民兵而不是政府——可能是一种重要的机制。