Societies at risk: The impact of armed conflict on human development

Armed conflict is human development in reverse.

The full extent of the problem remains unknown, however, and fragmentation of research into multiple academic fields limits our understanding.

This multi-disciplinary program brings together scholars from economics, epidemiology, political science, and conflict research to study the effects of armed conflict in much more detail and comprehensiveness than earlier studies.

It takes a risk-analysis perspective, seeing the expected impact as a function of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability, and consider effects at both the macro and micro level, on economies, health, water security, political institutions, human rights, forced migration, and gender equality.

Hazard will be modeled through an early-warning system, expanding the well-established ViEWS system, to alert observers to particularly detrimental occurrences of violence.

We will model exposure to conflict events by accounting for how effects of violence are transmitted to locations far from the violence itself and over time.

We will also identify conditions that make local populations and institutions particularly vulnerable to the effects, and how conflict increases local populations' vulnerability to other shocks such as natural disasters.

Throughout, the program will study how the various impacts and vulnerabilities identified work to reinforce each other, and formulate policy recommendations for parties seeking to reduce the impact of armed conflict on human development.