ANTICIPATE: Anticipating the Impact of Armed Conflict on Human Development

Led by Håvard Hegre
Dec 2022 -

​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, epidemiology, 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, health, 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 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.


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Publications

Peer-reviewed Journal Article

Petrova, Kristina; Gudlaug Olafsdottir; Håvard Hegre & Elisabeth Gilmore (2023) The ‘conflict trap’ reduces economic growth in the shared socioeconomic pathways, Environmental Research Letters. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/acb163.
Hegre, Håvard; Paola Vesco & Michael Colaresi (2022) Lessons from an escalation prediction competition, International Interactions 48(4): 521–554.
Vesco, Paola; Håvard Hegre; Michael Colaresi; Remco Jansen; Adeline Lo; Gregor Reisch & Nils Weidmann (2022) United they stand: Findings from an escalation prediction competition, International Interactions 48(4): 860–896.

Book Chapter

Hegre, Håvard (2022) Early-warning Systems for Political Violence: How Should We Define our Prediction Targets?, in Taking Stock of Early Warning for Atrocity Prevention. Report from the 2021 Sudikoff Interdisciplinary Seminar on Genocide Prevention. Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (10–12).

Popular Article

Vesco, Paola; Michael Colaresi & Håvard Hegre (2022) The Results of a Prediction Competition Suggest the Fog of War Can Be Partially Lifted, PRIO Blogs, 30 December.

Report - Other

von Loeben, Sophie; Jana Birner; Kira Vinke; Christoph Gornott; Julia Blocher; Lucas Destrijcker; Benjamin Fischer; Stephanie Gleixner; Håvard Hegre; Lennart Jansen; Bryan Jones; Alexander Kjærum; Angelica Lindqvist-McGowan; Nicole Manger; Thomas Mayer; Julia Tomalka; Paola Vesco; Stefanie Wesch; & Antonia Zvolsky (2022) Moving from Reaction to Action: Anticipating Vulnerability Hotspots in the SahelGeneva, New York: UNHCR.
Hegre, Håvard; Angelica Lindqvist-McGowan; Paola Vesco; James Dale; Mihai Croicu; & David Randahl (2022) Forecasting fatalities in armed conflict: Forecasts for April 2022-March 2025Uppsala: Uppsala University.
Hegre, Håvard; James Dale; David Randahl; Mihai Croicu; Remco Jansen; Paola Vesco; Angelica Lindqvist-McGowan; Peder Landsverk; Maxine Ria Leis; Hannes Mueller; Christopher Rauh; Espen Geelmuyden Rød; Forogh Akbari; Tim Gåsste; & Malika Rakhmankulova (2022) Forecasting FatalitiesUppsala: Uppsala University.

Past Events