Fragile Lives 2025

About the conference

Fragile Lives 2025 is the second edition of an annual international expert conference focused on using rigorous, scientific evidence to inform policy interventions in fragile, conflict-affected, and underdeveloped settings. It will take place on 30 September and 1 October 2025 at Humboldt University in Berlin. This year’s central theme is:

Gender, Institutions, Fragility

We will review the role of gender and institutions in the formation, functioning and impacts of fragility, insecurity, conflict and emergency. Gender is a key lens to understand how heterogeneous such experiences can be while also recognizing that gender interacts with other identities, such as age, ability, displacement status, or ethnicity.

Keynote Speakers

Patricia Justino

Deputy Director of the United Nations World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER)

Patricia Justino is a development economist who works at the interface between Development Economics and Political Science. Patricia is currently Deputy Director at UNU-WIDER, Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in Brighton, UK, (on leave) and a Co-Director of the Households in Conflict Network (HiCN). She is a leading expert on political violence and socio-economic development, with her research focusing on the relationship between political violence, institutional transformation, governance, and development outcomes.

Amber Peterman

Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Amber Peterman is affiliated with the Department of Public Policy and the Transfer Project at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-leads the Cash Transfer and Intimate Partner Violence Research Collaborative and consult for a variety of research and policy organizations. Her research provides methodological and policy-relevant evidence linking gender and development in resource-poor settings.

Conference Program

In addition to the keynote speeches, Fragile Lives 2025 will once again feature a range of presentations and discussions on cutting-edge research and pressing policy challenges. To this end, we are hosting presentations in cooperation with Households in Conflict Network (HiCN), thereby creating a space for academics studying the micro-level impacts of conflict and fragility to present and discuss their ongoing work. Beyond these academic sessions, we are partnering with a range of donor, policy, and practice organizations for research-to-practice sessions on some of the most pressing crises the world is facing.

We will release a detailed conference program in late Summer.

Organizing Partners

Fragile Lives is hosted by a cooperation between Humboldt University of Berlin and Leibniz Institute for Vegetable and Ornamental Crops (IGZ), with support from ISDC – International Security and Development Center.