ucdp prio armed conflict database the onset dataset

A small but growing body of literature attempts to answer questions linked to the contribution of disaster to conflict, but, to date, the results have been varied, contradictory or inconclusive ( Salehyan, 2008 Scheffran et al., 2012 Buhaug et al., 2014 Mach et al., 2019). This article quantitatively unpacks disaster–conflict co-occurrence and answers the question about the role of disasters in the occurrence of armed conflict and controlling for other variables that have been found to affect armed conflict occurrence. From 1949 to 1958, an average of 18% of countries experiencing armed conflict also saw a disaster in the same year, whereas this number was 81% for 2009–2018. Since the early 1980s, the number of countries experiencing both armed conflict and disaster in the same year has systematically increased ( Figure 1).

Rather than being isolated events, disasters and violent conflicts often happen at the same time, resulting in severe consequences ( Mena and Hilhorst, 2020 Peters, 2021). Alongside this trend, in 2019 alone, the livelihoods of more than 90 million people were impacted by disasters related to natural hazards, such as earthquakes or floods, with approximately 23,900 people losing their lives because of disaster-related causes ( CRED, 2019). According to the World Bank ( Corral et al., 2020), by 2030, up to two-thirds of the world’s extremely poor will live in fragile and conflict-affected situations, which threatens to reverse development gains and hinder progress toward the global goal of reducing worldwide poverty to below 3%. The full terms of this licence may be seen at Īrmed conflict and disasters can both trigger extensive loss of human life as well as social and economic disruption in the affected communities. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial & non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Copyright © 2023, Nicolás Caso, Dorothea Hilhorst, Rodrigo Mena and Elissaios Papyrakis.

Ucdp prio armed conflict database the onset dataset