New RJ program at the DPCR: Societies at Risk

Riksbankens Jubileumsfond decided last week to fund the “Societies at Risk” program, directed by Håvard Hegre and mainly based at the department. In addition to Håvard, it will involve Ashok Swain, Paola Vesco, Magnus Öberg, Nina von Uexkull, and Jonathan Hall at the department, as well as Johan von Schreeb and Anneli Eriksson at KI, Debarati Guha-Sapir at CRED, Tilman Brück at ISDC, Hannes Mueller at AUB Barcelona, Michael Colaresi at Pitt, Staffan Lindberg at GU, and Christopher Rauh at Cambridge.

Summary in Swedish at:  https://www.rj.se/anslag/2021/samhallen-i-fara-effekten-av-vapnad-konflikt-pa-mansklig-utveckling/

Title and abstract:

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

Armed conflict is human development in reverse. The full scale of conflicts' impacts remains unknown, however, and fragmentation of research into multiple academic fields limits our understanding. This multi-disciplinary programme brings together scholars from economics, epidemiology, political science, and conflict research to study the impacts in much more detail and comprehensiveness than earlier studies. It takes a risk-analysis perspective, assessing 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 and human rights, and forced migration. It will model exposure to conflict events by accounting for how effects of observed, overt violence are transmitted to locations far from the violence itself and over time, identify conditions that make local communities, marginalized groups, and women particularly vulnerable to the effects, and study how conflict increases their vulnerability to other shocks such as natural disasters. Hazard will be modeled through an early-warning system, expanding the well-established ViEWS system, to also alert observers to particularly detrimental occurrences of violence. Throughout, the programme 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 on human development.