Armed conflict is human development in reverse. The full scale of conflicts’ impacts remains unknown, however, and fragmentation of research into multiple academic fields limits our understanding. This multi-disciplinary project brings together scholars from economics, political science, and conflict research to study the impacts in much more detail and comprehensiveness than earlier studies. It takes a risk-analysis perspective, assessing the expected impact as a function of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability, and consider effects at both the macro and micro level, on economies, human development, and political institutions. It will model exposure to conflict events by accounting for how effects of observed, overt violence are transmitted to locations far from the violence itself and over time, identify conditions that make local communities, marginalized groups, and women particularly vulnerable to the effects, and study how conflict increases their vulnerability to other shocks such as natural disasters. The objective of the project is to model hazard as a probability distribution over the predicted number of direct deaths from violence in locations across the world, exposure as a model for the extent to which local populations are affected by this likely violence, and vulnerability as how exposure is translated into adverse human development impact for these populations. The results will be coordinated in the form of a monthly updated early warning system, expanding the well-established ViEWS model, to also alert observers to particularly detrimental occurrences of violence. Throughout, the project will study how the various impacts and vulnerabilities identified work to reinforce each other, and formulate policy recommendations for parties seeking to reduce the impact on human development.
As stressed in the influential report Pathways to Peace developed jointly by the UN and the World Bank forceful action in the face of conflict-induced disasters requires that we fully appreciate and anticipate the extent of the havoc. Early warning allows early action. The core aim of ANTICIPATE is to contribute significantly to assisting stakeholders in anticipating the negative humanitarian impact of armed conflict, in the form of a sound theoretical and methodological basis for a systematic, quantitative impact forecasting system. To be useful, such a system must be transparent, systematic, have uniform coverage across the geographical area it covers, and be updated frequently. It should look a few years into the future, a time range for which action could plausibly be taken and have effect. It must be possible to link the anticipated impact to the political violence that triggers it. Then, even when politics – violent and non-violent – render humanitarian assistance infeasible, the warnings can be used to demonstrate the adverse consequences of the choices made by cynical actors.
