Publications

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.

This report provides an in-depth review of the literature on food security and conflict, bringing together multiple streams of research and setting up an analytic framework of food security and conflict as well as econometric and statistical analyses of food security and violent conflict across different degrees of disaggregation.

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.

Our study examines whether the social cohesion of the immediate living context is related to the strength of Big Five personality traits among individuals. Using data from a community survey of 6252 adults living in 30 rural sub-districts in the Kyrgyz Republic, where social cohesion is a sizable policy concern, we conduct a multilevel analysis of the relationship between sub-district cohesion and individual personality.

During the previous decade there has been an increased focus on the role of food security…

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…

This paper analyses the distributive impacts of internal violent conflicts, in contrast to previous literature which…

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…

The end of the so-called pax narcótica and the escalation of violence in Mexico’s drug war…

This volume presents an innovative new analytical framework for understanding the dynamics of violent conflict and its impact on people and communities living in contexts of violence.

This book analyses the efficiency and equity of the economic restructuring in the two largest successor states of the Soviet Union, Russia and Ukraine.

Whilst most books look at the political response to terror, this unique book takes an economic approach and includes contributions from Todd Sandler, Sanjay Jain, Andrew Chen, Valpy FitzGerald and Dennis Mueller.

This book provides an insight into some of the principal issues that arise in post-conflict economic and social reconstruction, and offers examples of what works, and what does not.