The impacts of armed conflict on human development: a review of the literature

Paola Vesco, Ghassan Baliki, Tilman Brück, Debarati Guha-Sapir, Jonathan Hall, Stefan Döring, Anneli Eriksson, Hanne Fjelde, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Maxine R. Leis, Hannes Mueller, Christopher Rauh, Ida Rudolfsen, Ashok Swain, Alexa Timlick, Phaidon T. B. Vassiliou, Johan von Schreeb, Nina von Uexkull and Håvard Hegre

No 414, HiCN Working Papers from Households in Conflict Network

Abstract: The detrimental impacts of wars on human development are well documented across research domains, from public health to micro-economics. However, these impacts are studied in compartmentalized silos, which limits a comprehensive understanding of the consequences of conflicts, hampering our ability to effectively sustain human development. This article takes a first step in filling this gap by reviewing the literature on conflict impacts through the lens of an inter-disciplinary theoretical framework. We review the literature on the consequences of conflicts across 9 dimensions of human development: health, schooling, livelihood and income, growth and investments, political institutions, migration and displacement, socio-psychological wellbeing and capital, water access, and food security. The study focuses on both direct and indirect impacts of violence, reviews the existing evidence on how impacts on different dimensions of societal wellbeing and development may intertwine, and suggests plausible mechanisms to explain how these connections materialize. This exercise leads to the identification of critical research gaps and reveals that systemic empirical testing of how the impacts of war spread across sectors is severely lacking. By streamlining the literature on the impacts of war across multiple domains, this review represents a first step to build a common language that can overcome disciplinary silos and achieve a deeper understanding of how war reverberates across society. This multidisciplinary understanding of conflict impacts may eventually help reconcile divergent estimates and enable forward-looking policies that minimize the costs of war.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hicn.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/HiCN-WP-414.pdf Full PDF document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hic:wpaper:414

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HiCN Working Papers from Households in Conflict Network
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tilman Brück () and () and () and ().