Can jobs programs build peace?

In the last decade, well over $10 billion has been spent on employment programs designed to contribute to peace and stability. Despite the outlay, whether these programs perform, and how they do so, remain open questions. This study conducts three reviews to derive the status quo of knowledge. First, it draws on academic literature on the microfoundations of instability to distill testable theories of how employment programs could affect stability at the micro level. Second, it analyses academic and grey literature that directly evaluates the impacts of employment programs on peace-related outcomes. Third, it conducts a systematic review of program-based learning from over 400 interventions. This study finds good theoretical reasons to believe that employment programs could contribute to peace. However, only very limited evidence exists on overall impacts on peace or on the pathways underlying the theories of change. At the program level, the review finds strong evidence that contributions to peace and stability are often simply assumed to have occurred. This provides a major challenge for the justification of continued spending on jobs for peace programs. Instead, systematic and rigorous learning on the impacts of jobs for peace programs needs to be scaled up urgently

War and behavior

Militärdienst in Kriegsgebieten prägt das Leben von Millionen von Menschen weltweit. Ziel dieser Dissertation ist es, besser zu verstehen wie und weshalb junge Männer Praktiken und Strategien von Armeen ausgesetzt sind, und wie diese Erfahrungen ihr langfristiges Verhalten prägen. Die Arbeit enthält drei eigenständige Essays, die diese Themen jeweils theoretisch als auch empirisch behandeln. Die empirische Analyse nutzt selbst erhobene Umfragedaten von 760 angolanischen Veteranen, detaillierte Einblicke in den lokalen Kontext und den angolanischen Bürgerkrieg als ein natürliches Experiment um kausale Mechanismen zu identifizieren. Kapitel 2 argumentiert, dass ein nichtstaatlicher Kriegsakteur ähnlich wie ein Staatsakteur in der Lage sein kann lokal Steuern zu erheben und, dass ein solcher Akteur Wehrpflicht zur Rekrutierung einsetzt. Kapitel 3 offenbart, dass Soldaten, die mehr in lokaler `governance` mit der Armee involviert sind, in der Nachkriegszeit im Durchschnitt mehr zur Herstellung öffentlicher Gütern beitragen. Mehr Erfahrung mit sozialer Kooperation stimuliert die Teilnahme in Planungsprozessen, während eine Verschiebung der politischen Präferenzen Beiträge zur Bereitstellung der Güter fördert. Kapitel 4 zeigt, dass Erlebnisse sexueller Gewalt gegen Zivilistinnen auf lange Sicht das Risiko von Gewalttaten gegen die eigene Partnerin erhöhen. Der Grund ist eine nachhaltige Reduzierung psychologischer Barrieren gegenüber Gewalt gegen Frauen. Die Arbeit trägt zu mehreren Literaturen zu den langfristigen Ursprüngen menschlichen Verhaltens und der Mechanik und Folgen gewaltsamer Konflikte bei. Die Befunde stellen konventionelle Rekrutierungsmodelle in Frage, vorherrschende Theorien häuslicher Gewalt, sowie unser Verständnis davon, wie Krieg lokal Institutionen verändert. Die Ergebnisse zeigen neue Wege auf, wie Entwicklungspolitik kriegsbedingte Verhaltensmuster angehen und sich zunutze machen kann, um dadurch mehr Kooperation und weniger Gewalt zu schaffen.Military service in conflict zones strongly marks the lives of millions of people across the world. The objective of this thesis is to contribute to understanding how and why young men are exposed to practices and policies by armed groups, and how these experiences affect their behavior in the long run. The thesis presents three self-contained essays that all address this objective theoretically and empirically. The empirical analysis relies on primary survey data from 760 Angolan veterans, uses deep insights into the local context and exploits the Angolan Civil War as a natural experiment to identify causal mechanisms. Chapter 2 argues that a non-state armed actor may – like a state actor – have the ability to tax a local population and will choose conscription as its primary recruitment policy. Chapter 3 exposes that former soldiers who were more involved in local governance during the war are significantly more likely to participate in collective public good production more than a decade after the end of the war. Gaining experience with social cooperation increases contributions to organizing public goods, while a shift in political preferences fosters participation in their delivery. Chapter 4 shows that exposure to sexual violence by armed groups significantly increases an individual’s long-term propensity to commit violence against an intimate partner. This effect is underpinned by a reduction of psychological barriers to violence against women. The thesis contributes to several literatures on the long-run individual-level origins of human behavior and on the conduct and consequences of armed conflict. The findings challenge conventional models of rebel recruitment, dominant theories of domestic violence and existing knowledge of how war affects local institutions. The findings can also help policymakers to tackle and leverage long-run impacts of conflict on behavior, in order to devise new policies for more cooperative and less violent societies

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Food security and conflict: Empirical challenges and future opportunities for research and policy making on food security and conflict

During the previous decade there has been an increased focus on the role of food security in conflict processes, both in the academic and policy communities'

IFAD RESEARCH SERIES 54 Rural youth in the context of fragility and conflict

Despite accounting for only 7 per cent of the world’s population, rural youth account for more than 10 per cent of the world’s conflict-exposed population. In 2016, alone, over 350 million rural youth lived in conflict-affected countries. Despite conflict’s being defined as “development in reverse”, however, we find a general lack of research focusing specifically on young people living in rural areas. Yet, from wider literature, we know that conflict is a cause of adversities across a range of economic and non-economic indicators. When young people experience violence in consecutive life stages, adversities from one stage – such as weakened education – can be carried forward into subsequent life stages - such as transition to employment. In this background paper, we show that exposure to violence increases infant mortality, reduces birthweight, harms child health, damages human capital accumulation, restricts performance in education and interacts negatively with labour market opportunities. Despite this accumulated knowledge, however, we note that key knowledge gaps remain, especially when it comes to understanding the programmes that can mitigate the damage exposure to conflict causes. There is, therefore, an urgent need to understand how and why exposure to conflict harms the lives of rural youth, and perhaps more importantly, how it harms those lives differently from those of other socio-demographic groups. Given that rural youth are disproportionately affected by conflict, there is also a need for the design of, and learning from, programmes that are specifically targeted at protecting and empowering rural youth during the post-conflict phase

Trust in the Time of Corona

The global spread of COVID-19 is one of the largest threats to people and governments since the Second World War. The on-going pandemic and its countermeasures have led to varying physical, psychological, and emotional experiences, shaping not just public health and the economy but also societies. We focus on one pillar of society—trust—and explore how trust correlates with the individual experiences of the pandemic. The analysis is based on a new global survey—‘Life with Corona’—and uses simple correlational statistics. We show that those who have had contact with sick people and those that are unemployed exhibit lower trust in people, institutions, and in general. By contrast, no such differences exist for those who have personally experienced symptoms of the disease. These associations vary across contexts and are not driven by concerns about personal health or the health of loved ones, but rather by increased levels of worry and stress. Our findings suggest that the effects of the pandemic go well beyond immediate health concerns, leading to important normative changes that are likely to shape how societies will emerge from the pandemic

The life with corona survey

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis affecting everyone. Yet, its challenges and countermeasures vary significantly over time and space. Individual experiences of the pandemic are highly heterogeneous and its impacts span and interlink multiple dimensions, such as health, economic, social and political impacts. Therefore, there is a need to disaggregate “the pandemic”: analysing experiences, behaviours and impacts at the micro level and from multiple disciplinary perspectives. Such analyses require multi-topic pan-national survey data that are collected continuously and can be matched with other datasets, such as disease statistics or information on countermeasures. To this end, we introduce a new dataset that matches these desirable properties - the Life with Corona (LwC) survey - and perform illustrative analyses to show the importance of such micro data to understand how the pandemic and its countermeasures shape lives and societies over time.publishe

Life with Corona: increased gender differences in aggression and depression symptoms due to the COVID-19 pandemic burden in Germany

Gender differences (GD) in mental health have come under renewed scrutiny during the COVID-19 pandemic. While rapidly emerging evidence indicates a deterioration of mental health in general, it remains unknown whether the pandemic will have an impact on GD in mental health. To this end, we investigate the association of the pandemic and its countermeasures affecting everyday life, labor, and households with changes in GD in aggression, anxiety, depression, and the somatic symptom burden. We analyze cross-sectional data from 10,979 individuals who live in Germany and who responded to the online survey “Life with Corona” between October 1, 2020 and February 28, 2021. We estimate interaction effects from generalized linear models. The analyses reveal no pre-existing GD in aggression but exposure to COVID-19 and COVID-19 countermeasures is associated with sharper increases in aggression in men than in women. GD in anxiety decreased among participants with children in the household (with men becoming more anxious). We also observe pre-existing and increasing GD with regards to the severity of depression, with women presenting a larger increase in symptoms during the hard lockdown or with increasing stringency. In contrast to anxiety, GD in depression increased among participants who lived without children (women > men), but decreased for individuals who lived with children; here, men converged to the levels of depression presented by women. Finally, GD in somatic symptoms decreased during the hard lockdown (but not with higher stringency), with men showing a sharper increase in symptoms, especially when they lived with children or alone. Taken together, the findings indicate an increase in GD in mental health as the pandemic unfolded in Germany, with rising female vulnerability to depression and increasing male aggression. The combination of these two trends further suggests a worrying mental health situation for singles and families. Our results have important policy implications for the German health system and public health policy. This public health challenge requires addressing the rising burden of pandemic-related mental health challenges and the distribution of this burden between women and men, within families and for individuals who live alone

The life with corona survey

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis affecting everyone. Yet, its challenges and countermeasures vary significantly over time and space. Individual experiences of the pandemic are highly heterogeneous and its impacts span and interlink multiple dimensions, such as health, economic, social and political impacts. Therefore, there is a need to disaggregate “the pandemic”: analysing experiences, behaviours and impacts at the micro level and from multiple disciplinary perspectives. Such analyses require multi-topic pan-national survey data that are collected continuously and can be matched with other datasets, such as disease statistics or information on countermeasures. To this end, we introduce a new dataset that matches these desirable properties - the Life with Corona (LwC) survey - and perform illustrative analyses to show the importance of such micro data to understand how the pandemic and its countermeasures shape lives and societies over time