RJ announces 39.7M SEK grant for 'Societies at Risk'

Research programme: Societies at Risk – the effect of armed conflict on human development

Principal Investigator: Håvard Hegre

Participating researchers:  Håvard Hegre, Ashok Swain, Paola Vesco, Magnus Öberg, Nina von Uexkull, and Jonathan Hall at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University; Johan von Schreeb and Anneli Eriksson at Karolinska Institutet; Debarati Guha-Sapir at CRED; Tilman Brück at ISDC; Hannes Mueller at the Barcelona School of Economics; Michael Colaresi at University of Pittsburgh, Staffan Lindberg at University of Gothenburg, and Christopher Rauh at University of Cambridge.

Programme period: 2022-01-01 – 2027-12-31

Abstract: 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 understand- ing. 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.