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Conflict

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Governing Human Well-Being

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Abstract

This chapter analyzes the consequences of conflict by examining how the different types of conflict, namely interstate versus intrastate conflicts, and the different dimensions of conflict, namely the occurrence, magnitude, and duration of conflicts among states as well as the magnitude of interstate and intrastate conflicts among neighboring states, influence human well-being outcomes. The chapter identifies numerous causal mechanisms through which conflicts adversely affect human well-being. The theory is tested through a statistical analysis on a global sample of countries and includes a case narrative on Iraq.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The conflict data come from Major Episodes of Political Violence (Marshall 2015). The subsequent empirical analyses section discusses how both interstate and intrastate conflict variables are measured.

  2. 2.

    These countries were involved in civil conflicts , and the extravagant figures suggest the extent to which resources are diverted to military expenditures in spite of the fact that there were more pressing problems in these countries, like famines.

  3. 3.

    Even though Palestine is not recognized as an international entity, the alarming rate of child deaths in Gaza indicates that children, being one of the most vulnerable groups, undergo tremendous suffering during conflicts .

  4. 4.

    It is worth noting, however, that there is not a complete consensus that conflict reduces trade (e.g., Barbieri and Levy 1999, 2001).

  5. 5.

    A detailed description of all the dependent variables and control variables and methodology is discussed in Chap. 2. All the models also control for the level of democracy. I use the “polity2” variable from the Polity IV data set to classify democracies and nondemocracies (Marshall et al. 2014). The variable ranges from −10 to +10, where higher values indicate higher levels of democracy.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Public Service, Political Science, Boise State University, Boise, Idaho, USA

    Nisha Bellinger

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  1. Nisha Bellinger
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Bellinger, N. (2018). Conflict. In: Governing Human Well-Being. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65391-4_5

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