Recent global history is marked by several instances of civil conflict, where people of the same nationality have taken up arms against each other. The role of the disease environment in outbreaks of civil war has so far been largely overlooked, says Professor Uwe Sunde of the DISCON project, an EU-backed initiative taking a fresh look at the topic
Exploring the links between civil conflict and disease The last fifty years have been marked by regular outbreaks of civil violence across the world, where citizens of the same nation have taken up arms against each other. While issues like ethnic tensions, resource allocation and political representation have often been major factors behind these outbreaks, the role of the disease environment has been largely overlooked, now researchers in the DISCON project are taking a fresh look at the subject. “The basic idea of the project is to bring health into the picture, and find out whether variation in health threats, or the outbreak of epidemics, can have a causal effect on the outbreak of civil violence,” says Professor Uwe Sunde, the project’s Principal Investigator. In some cases external actors have become involved in civil violence, yet Professor Sunde says the project is focused on civil conflict between people of the same nation. “We have different data sources. We’re most interested in intra-state conflicts that are fought among sections of the same nation without external interventions,” he outlines. There have been many examples of such conflicts over the last fifty years, and Professor Sunde and his colleagues have access to a wealth of data from across the
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globe in their research. This is combined with further epidemiological information to help researchers build a deeper picture of the role of disease in civil violence. “We use data sources that collect data on conflicts worldwide at a high level of temporal resolution on an annual basis. We combine that with information from epidemiological databases, that measure
Disease exposure A key step in the project is to establish whether there is a potential causal effect of disease exposure on outbreaks of civil conflict. Professor Sunde and his colleagues have been working on a research paper in this area. “We look at civil war as an outcome, and we use an identification strategy based on exposure
We essentially look at droughts or heat waves, and whether they have a different impact in terms of the outbreak of civil conflict if they happen in an area with few diseases or many diseases disease exposure in terms of infections and diagnosis of certain disease conditions,” says Professor Sunde. Typically a wide range of factors are involved in outbreaks of civil violence, so Professor Sunde aims to exclude other causes aside from the disease environment. “We control for as much we can, including factors like income and ethnic polarisation,” he stresses. “Essentially all measures of potential determinants of civil conflict highlighted in previous research are accounted for in our empirical framework.”
to particular diseases that are essentially non-eradicable, non-preventable, and that cannot be communicated or spread through conflict,” he explains. These diseases are called multi-host vector transmitted diseases (MHVD), examples of which include dengue fever and malaria. “These diseases cannot be transmitted human-to-human – a vector is required. The vector in the case of malaria is a mosquito,” continues Professor Sunde. “This means that in areas where the disease isn’t present, or that aren’t
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