We investigate long‐term trends in intergenerational educational mobility in Kyrgyzstan and find that Kyrgyzstan maintained high educational mobility, comparable to levels during the Soviet era. However, younger cohorts, exposed to the transition during their school years, experienced a rapid decline in educational mobility.

Community-driven development (CDD) – a widely practiced tool by development donors and practitioners worldwide – strives to empower and develop communities by giving them joint control over aid allocations. This is expected to improve local development, local governance, and strengthen social cohesion. However, the empirical evidence for the third outcome is quite weak. This paper […]

This evaluation estimates the impact of a school-based peacebuilding educational training programme called LivingSideBySide’ (LSBS) implemented in 2014 and 2015 in southern Kyrgyzstan.

Endline analysis of FAO Northeast Nigeria Resilience Programme show significant improvements in food security particularly to IDPs and households living under extreme violent conflict, underscoring the significant of developmental interventions in protracted crises.

Endline analysis of FAO Northeast Nigeria Resilience Programme show significant improvements in food security particularly to IDPs and households living under extreme violent conflict, underscoring the significance of developmental interventions in protracted crises.

Food insecurity and violent conflict are global challenges and causally linked to each other in many ways. We provide a brief survey over key themes in the quantitative literature on this nexus. We focus on the micro-level, the role of conflict type, heterogeneity, resilience, and humanitarian crises. Little is known about how to design effective policies to help households escape combined conflict-hunger traps. Finally, better data at the micro-level will provide a large boost to much needed research in this field.

Peacebuilding assistance and security sector assistance both aim at the same outcome – reductions in political violence. In this exploratory article, we show only the former has its desired impact, with security sector support apparently acting to increase violence.

Often, development organisations engage in “big push” ex post impact evaluations, where significant amounts of bespoke data are collected at the end of the programme. In this short paper, we argue that such funds can be used better by integrated an on-going learning component into standard ADME.

Although much has been learned about the performance of food aid interventions, less is known about their impact in situations of chronic, rather than acute, food insecurity. In this article, we show little medium-term impact of direct food provision of nutritional outcomes but a strong, positive, impact of assets based programming in chronically food insecure Niger.

Over $10bn has been spent on programmes that assume that building employment also builds peace. We show that while there are good reasons to think this money is not spent fruitlessly, there remains a structural lack of empirical confirmation of these theories.

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While randomisation is often eschewed in bottom-up peacebuilding contexts in favour of more targeted programming, there is no guarantee that targeted spending gets to those who need it most. In this article, we discuss the apparent failure of one such targeted rollout – that of the PEACE II programmes in Ireland.

The theories that explain relationships between welfare and work do not provide clear insight for developing countries. In this paper, we confirm that hours worked and income are insufficient to explain the relationship between jobs and wellbeing in a developing country.

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During the previous decade there has been an increased focus on the role of food security in conflict processes, both in the academic and policy communities. While the policy community has pushed forward with new programs, the academic debate about the causal linkages between food security and conflict remains debated. This article emphasizes the endogeneity […]

Research on civil wars tends towards the study of networked revolutionary actors and a government, yet many conflicts have given rise to pro-state militants. In this article, I theorise that the rise of such groups increases net devotion to violence and confirm this violence premium using conflict data from Northern Ireland.

Each year billions of US-dollars of humanitarian assistance are mobilised in response to man-made emergencies and natural disasters. Yet, rigorous evidence for how best to intervene remains scant. This dearth reflects that rigorous impact evaluations of humanitarian assistance pose major methodological, practical and ethical challenges. While theory-based impact evaluations can crucially inform humanitarian programming, popular […]

This paper analyses the distributive impacts of internal violent conflicts, in contrast to previous literature which has focused on the effects of inequality on conflict. We use cross-country panel data for the time period 1960–2014 to estimate war-related changes in income inequality. Our results indicate rising levels of inequality during war and especially in the […]

It is very well established that conflict damages human capital accumulation of those exposed to violence. In this article, we hint at a much longer-term regional perspective. Areas that experience war in previous generations are the most deprived today and suffer poorer education performance than non-affected areas.

This paper reviews both current practices and common challenges of measuring the causes, functioning, and consequences of violent conflict at the micro-level. The authors review existing conflict — and violence-related survey questionnaires, with a particular focus on the World Bank’s Living Standard Measurement Surveys. Further, they discuss methodological challenges associated with empirical work in conflict-affected […]