Armed conflicts are humanitarian disasters that kill and injure millions of people, and leave many more destitute. And unfortunately, these immediate sufferings are just the tip of the iceberg of the true human costs of armed conflicts.Exposure to such gruesome violence either as witnesses, victims or perpetrators is to affect and scar people in serious ways, and these effects are likely to manifest themselves in different ways in interpersonal relations, and in economic and political life even long after the conflict is over. The development of a thorough understanding of these long-term impacts and the mechanisms they have behind is a precondition for devising effective preventive and counteractive policies. Nevertheless, identifying the causal impacts of armed conflict exposure is an empirical challenge, and we are still far from a complete understanding of the true extent of the damages armed conflicts inflict upon host societies. EXPOVIBE contributes to that crucial understanding in very significant and important ways by building on a population-level natural experiment created by the Turkish military institutions and the long running ethnic conflict in the country. As part of the project two large-n survey studies have been conducted in western Turkey. The first study surveyed some 6384 married Turkish women between the ages 25 and 50, and focused on intimate partner violence. The second study surveyed 5024 adult Turkish men to study the association between exposure to political violence and social, economic and political behavior.
Analyzing the data collected via these surveys, EXPOVIBE identifies the causal effect of armed conflict exposure for the average adult male. The study design also takes advantage of the geographical distribution of the conflict to identify clean treatment and control groups, and deciphers the underlying mechanisms that carry the effects. Finally, the richness of the collected data allows the exploration of effects over an unprecedentedly rich set of outcomes.
As prominent examples of these outcomes, findings indicate adverse effects on IPV perpetration from husband to wife. Moreover, contrary to the arguments that war fosters pro-sociality, EXPOVIBE offers compelling evidence that conflict exposure fosters parochialism, measured by opposition to peaceful means of conflict resolution, animosity towards minorities, and adherence to right-wing ideology, with effects likely flowing through social learning, grievances, and the normalization of violence.
The effects that the project has so far identified are important in several ways: First, they concern the social, economic, and political life of societies. Second, they are long term. It is striking to find that individuals continue to exhibit the effects even after decades since their armed conflict experiences. Third, effects are negative. Contrary to arguments in the literature about potential positive effects engendered by post-traumatic growth, EXPOVIBE findings indicate armed conflict exposure to lead to undesirable social, economic, and political outcomes like domestic violence, parochialism, militarism, aggression, normalization of violence in everyday life, and psychological distress.
