How Pandemics Affect Levels of Violence in Civil Conflicts

• In Event: Climate and Health Challenges to Conflict Prevention

Abstract

Covid-19 caught many countries completely off-guard with its voracity and lethality. Although a relationship between diseases and conflict has long been asserted in the fields of political science and epidemiology, most research has been on the impact of conflict on disease spread and intensity while little has been done on the impact of diseases on conflict intensity. To understand the impact of pandemics and epidemics on conflict, it is therefore necessary to pull from a variety of topics that are tangential to disease (i.e., natural disasters, spillover, and state capacity) and use the theories and methods from these related topics to better understand how pandemics affect civil conflict. Covid-19 and its repercussions highlight the need to understand how pandemics affect civil conflict and to understand the causal mechanisms driving these effects. Preliminary results about Smallpox and Cholera suggest that there is initially a lull in violence followed by an increase in violence as groups realize that a state who is focused on disease mitigation leaves a power vacuum to fill.

Author

• Britt Koehnlein, Indiana University