(Re)Emerging Disease and Global Security in the 21st Century

This project’s key goal is to investigate how (re)emerging zoonotic disease outbreaks shape the risk of different types of conflict and violence, highlighting local and global security impacts. An original database of confirmed outbreak events and conflict incidents over healthcare issues across the globe involving 30 different pathogens (1996-2024) will be in a collected.

These data will be used to develop an understanding of both how zoonotic outbreaks shape conflict risk, and how conflict can impact the risk of epidemic outbreaks by inducing constraints on detection and response. This information will directly inform national security practices and improve American preparedness for emerging security challenges in the 21st security.

The project will also lay a path toward better integrating infectious disease’s impacts across the social sciences, and – by directly involving graduate students as coauthors and collaborators – training the next generation of scholars studying emerging threats to global security.

This project will address the present lack of a comprehensive theoretical understanding and assessment of infectious zoonotic diseases’ causal impacts on political conflict, including civil war and violence against civilians, as well as the limited availability of datasets with deep temporal and spatial coverages for infectious disease outbreaks. It will analyze several relevant pathways for zoonotic diseases outbreaks’ impact on global and local security, e.g., by destroying state capacity, impacting food security, and facilitating repressive violence.

To this end, the project will collect global data on zoonotic disease outbreak events involving 30 emerging pathogens, measured at the subnational (village/town/district level) and sub-annual (day/week/month) level across the globe over the last three decades. In the process, it will also generate fine-grained data on political conflict incidents specifically perpetrated over infectious-disease related issues.

The theoretical and empirical findings will aid in developing more generalizable theories of disease and conflict, with implications for improving national and international security and preparedness, offering a crucial ability to generate timely and critical insights into zoonotic diseases’ systematic impacts on these and other conflict and international relations aspects. These scientific findings will be disseminated to academic audiences via conference presentations, peer reviewed publications, and briefs for decision makers.

All resulting databases will be made openly available online to scholars, policymakers, and students, contributing to a wide number of future science-use cases, not only in the arena of security and preparedness, but also across the social, environmental, and health sciences.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.