In the last 15 years, civil conflict has gradually become an important subject of study for empirical economists. As a result, conflict research has adopted many empirical methods from mainstream economics. Furthermore, there is now a broad consensus that violent political conflict and economic development are intertwined, and a fast-growing literature studies this relationship with micro-data. At the same time, applied research on conflict is increasingly embracing new empirical methods, such as RCTs, geospatial analysis using high-resolution satellite imagery, machine learning methods, big data applications, and the large-scale digitization of archival resources. Each of these research tools has strengths and limitations and is the subject of ongoing methodological debates.
The 15th annual Households in Conflict Network Workshop will focus on how these new methods can be used in applied research on civil conflict. As in previous editions, we welcome any empirical paper on the causes, forms and consequences of civil conflict or related forms of political violence. However, we encourage work on civil conflict that uses these new empirical methods in particular.
The workshop will have three distinguished key-note speakers: Solomon Hsiang, Jacob Shapiro, Ekaterina Zhuravskaya.
The workshop is co-organized by François Libois (INRA, PSE), Oliver Vanden Eynde (CNRS, PSE), as well as the HiCN co-directors Tilman Brück (ISDC, IGZ and LSE), Patricia Justino (IDS) and Philip Verwimp (ULB).
The Households in Conflict Network (HiCN) is a global research network connecting empirical researchers working across the social sciences. HiCN publishes a working paper series with academic research and conducts annual workshops as well as topical workshops. Membership of HiCN is open to all researchers committed to the research agenda of HiCN with at least one suitable working paper for publication.
The Call for Papers can be downloaded here.
