News

Call for Papers New Methods for Impact Evaluationsin Conflict and Humanitarian Emergency Settings An International Interdisciplinary Research Workshop 6-7 July 2022 Hybrid event part-based in Berlin, Germany With financial support from the Centre for Excellence and Development Impact and Learning (CEDIL) and UK Aid and in collaboration with the Households in Conflict Network. ISDC – […]

Children in low income countries are expected to suffer the impact of the climate crisis on human health. A new study from Kyrgyzstan estimates the long-term consequences of extreme weather conditions on child stunting as a proxy for child development. It combines a rich three-wave panel dataset of children aged 0-59 months and location-matched weather […]

ISDC is proud to announce a new partnership with the Kyiv School of Economics in Ukraine. Through our new collaboration, we hope to deepen our direct contact and cooperation between researchers across both institutions by establishing joint research projects and facilitating research visits. Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), founded in 1996 by the EERC and […]

The order of magnitude of the economic burden of war is comparable to that of other ‘global public bads’, such as climate change, land degradation, alcohol consumption or malaria. Figure 1. Distribution and structure of the burden of violent conflict in 2014  Disaggregation of the relative burden of conflict per country worldwide. In 2014, the […]

Displacement trends show that developing countries host most of the world’s refugees and are dealing with displacement that lasts longer today than in the past. UNHCR sees an opportunity to improve outcomes for both refugees and host communities by combining humanitarian and development strategies. In collaboration with Julian Lehmann and Julia Steets of GPPi, our […]

How do post-disaster humanitarian responses affect long-term food behaviour? Researchers, including Tilman Brück and Ghassan Baliki of ISDC, studied food behaviour in Nepal’s Sindhupalhok District. Their data reveal increased consumption of unhealthy snack foods in earthquake-affected regions. Findings indicate that “external shocks such as an earthquake and the subsequent humanitarian assistance, while well-intentioned and incredibly […]

The virtual IGNITE8 conference by SPARK and IFC examines how women, refugees, and other vulnerable youth can play a key role in reimagining jobs across the Middle East, North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. Sessions will be held in English with Arabic translation.   Register for free here: IGNITE Conference 2021 – SPARK 

SEEDS for Recovery evaluates the long-term impact of a complex agricultural intervention conducted by FAO in acutely conflict-affected Syria. The project, funded under the CEDIL– Centre of Excellence for Development Impact and Learning initiative, is a collaboration between ISDC and the American University of Beirut. The 3-year duration (2020-2023) project aims at developing and testing innovative methods for evaluation of FAO’s agricultural […]

Online event hosted by the University of Göttingen Dates: 11-12 October 2021 The keynote speaker is Mathias Thoenig, Professor of Economics at the School of Business and Economics at the University of Lausanne. In an open plenary session, which is jointly organized by the Centre for Global Migration Studies (CeMig) and the German Development Institute/Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE), we discuss “Migration and Security Policy” with Ruben […]

The Taliban will be denied access to an estimated $9.4 billion in central bank assets held in the US, Washington has announced. But Afghanistan expert Tilman Brück says the Muslim fundamentalists won’t be impressed. Watch the interview here.

Since October 2020, HG4RR has hosted a series of webinars focused on the challenges and opportunities of home garden interventions and evaluation in development and emergency settings. Expert guest speakers joined Prof. Dr. Tilman Brück from the Leibniz Institute of Vegetable and Ornamental Crops/ISDC to discuss their work, followed by a panel discussion and Q&A session. […]

The Institute of Public Policy and Administration of the University of Central Asia (UCA), the Leibniz Institute of Vegetable and Ornamental Crops (IGZ), and ISDC – International Security and Development Center invite submission of proposals for sessions and individual research papers for the 7th Annual ‘Life in Kyrgyzstan’ Conference, to be held online during October 26-28, 2021. The […]

Online event hosted by the University of Göttingen (potentially hybrid if the situation allows it)Dates: 11-12 October 2021 Considering that one percent of the world population is displaced and ten percent of the world population lives under conflict, the complex nexus of forced migration, development, and security is central to the analysis of household welfare. When accounting for […]

Watch the keynote speech “Political economy of humanitarian inaction in a connected world” by Dr. Arif Husain (UN WFP) given at the 16th Annual HiCN Workshop on Social Unrest and Violent Conflict in Times of Pandemics, 2020.

The registration for participation for the 6thAnnual ‘Life in Kyrgyzstan’ Conference, to be held online on 27-30 October 2020, is open. The conference is organized by the Institute of Public Policy and Administration of the University of Central Asia (UCA), the Leibniz Institute of Vegetable and Ornamental Crops (IGZ), and ISDC – International Security and […]

“Can jobs programs build peace?” has been published in the peer-reviewed journal “World Bank Research Observer”. This review of why jobs programs might build peace and whether or not they do is the result of collaboration between ISDC and Valeria Izzi, with support from ILO, PBSO, UNDP and the World Bank. The article highlights strong social science theories that link employment programs and peace but scant real world evidence that programs have successfully delivered this promise. Until such a link and its mechanisms can be robustly established, simply running good jobs programs in the difficult situations that require peacebuilding probably makes more sense.

Laura Peitz is among the winners of the Dahrendorf Forum PhD Research Paper Award. Her paper Too Many Cooks Don’t Spoil the Broth? – Bridging Literatures on Private Sector Engagement in Sustainable Development (working title) examines how research relevant to private sector engagement in sustainable development is currently conducted disconnectedly in various disciplines and programmes and discusses the […]

Older people worry less, Americans want priority access to vaccine – Global survey reveals generational and cultural differences in how we live with the pandemic On Thursday, 1 October2020,the second round of the Life with Corona global survey is being launched, alongside a report covering key findings from six monthsof data collectionincluding: Young adults actively […]

Funding for peace negotiations is often treated as a purely technical issue. However, on closer inspection, funding is fundamentally political and, as such, has a profound impact on the architecture and the dynamics of peace negotiations. For a functioning peace negotiation process, the funding requests of the negotiation stakeholders, defined as the negotiating parties and […]

A new project exploring how African citizens respond to and cope with the pandemic has been launched at ISDC. Funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Life with Corona in Africa project will run until December 2021 and will build on the unique Life with Corona online survey to advance understanding of how the […]

A new working paper has been published using the data from a new global Life with Corona survey. Tilman Brück, Neil Ferguson, Patricia Justino and Wolfgang Stojetz explore how trust correlates with the individual experiences of the pandemic. The authors show that those who have had contact with sick people and those that are unemployed show lower […]