Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for coming back in. Welcome to this plenary session 20 years of micro-level analysis of island conflicts. What next at this fantastic wider conference? My name is Tillman Brooke. I'm the founder and director of ISDC, International Security and Development Center in Independent Non-for-profit Research Center in Berlin, Germany, dedicated to the study of the conflict development nexus from an empirical and maybe not surprisingly micro-level perspective. I'm also one of the three co-founders and co-directors of the households and conflict network. More on that later. Studying conflict from a micro-level perspective is not something that academia has always been doing. In fact, at the groundbreaking peace making peace work conference here at Wider some 18 years ago, participants heard about 100 stimulating research papers on the drivers, forms and effects of violent conflict and of peace. However, only four of those 100 papers addressed how individuals and households experienced violence conflict. That people are central to both conflict and peace. Just like the macro economy is made up of zillions of small decisions and transactions, world peace is constituted by the actions of billions of people, however powerful or powerless they may be. We therefore need to understand how the actions of people, both good and bad, drive the emergence of peace, how these actions shape the forms and dynamics of peace, and how peace in turn shapes the lives and livelihoods of people. Studying these drivers, forms and impacts of peace and conflict is the mission of the households and conflict network, which Patricia Justino, who's here with us in the first row, Philip Verwimp and I established 18 years ago at the making peace work conference. What does the households and conflict network do? We have a distinguished list of affiliates. Many of you are here in the room affiliated with us and those of you who aren't yet, please feel free to do so. And they come from around the world and from many disciplines. We host a working paper series with nearly 400 papers published to date at our website hicn.org. And we host annual workshops. In fact, the next, the 18th annual workshop will be hosted by our wonderful colleague, Arzu Kibris, at the University of Warwick in the UK on the 23rd and 24th of November, 2022. The theme will be exposure to political violence and individual behavior, highlighting the importance of multidisciplinary micro-level research on peace and conflict. The call for papers is now open and we look forward to receiving submissions until the 31st of July, also from all of you here in the audience today. As it turns out, the organizer of the making peace work conference and the four presenters on these four micro-level papers at that conference are here with us today to help reflect on what we have achieved and what is next in conflict and peace in general and in the micro-level analysis in particular. It is therefore my pleasure to welcome a series of distinguished guests to this panel. And now this is where the plot thickens. First, Tony Addison, on my far right here on the panel, is a professor of economics at the University of Copenhagen. He was chief economist and deputy director of UNWIDE here in Helsinki and of course the host of the 2004 making peace work conference. Next in line on my right, we have status Calyvers, who is Gladstone Professor of Government and fellow of All Souls College at the University of Oxford. He was previously professor of political science at Yale University, where he founded and directed the program on order conflict and violence. And he and his program in Yale have been good friend and partner of the households in conflict network. Next on my panel, we have Anna Maria Ibanez, who is a professor at the School of Economics at the University of Los Andes in Bogota, Colombia and currently on leave working as the economics principal advisor at the Inter-American Development Bank. She's also one of the gang of four I mentioned earlier, presenting a micro-level analysis on the impacts of conflict at the 2004 conference. And another good friend and partner and former host of one of our annual workshops of the households in conflict network. And last but not least, Philip Fevimp on my immediate right is a professor of development economics at the University of Brussels and one of the fellow co-founders and co-directors of the households in conflict network. And of course, we have here, as I said earlier, Patricia Justino, who is the third co-director and co-founder of HICN and who, apart from having organized this amazing conference, is a senior research fellow here at Univider and on leave as professorial fellow from the Institute of Development Studies in the UK. Now, I've invited our four panelists to reflect a little bit on what we have achieved so far and where we are heading. And I'd like to ask each of them in turn to share their observations that will make up about the first hour of our panel. After that, we'll have some discussion here among ourselves on the panel. And finally, we'll also have some questions from you and the audience to discuss. So I'd like to invite Tony first to share some of his thoughts, please. Thank you. Good. So thank you very much, Tillman. It's great to be here and to see both old friends and also to make new friends, and that's very much what wider conferences are about. And we're very pleased at wider that we played a small role in helping to nurture the HICN group, which has grown very successfully over now, nearly two decades. So I suppose the first observation I'd make is I sort of reflected back on this, and Tillman mentioned this in his presentation. We didn't actually have a lot on the microeconomics of conflict at the conference 18 years ago. And in some ways, the study of conflict in economics has almost paralleled the way development economics as a subject has actually grown over the years. So in the sense that 20 years ago, we were making quite bold statements about the relationship of conflict to growth, to poverty, to inequality, to natural resources, and about the impact of conflict upon those. And those were useful statements, but those bold statements, we didn't really have much in the way of evidence, at least at the microeconomic level. We had some very useful cross-country regressions and so forth, but the sort of micro foundations were lacking. And in some ways, that's kind of a parallel of the experience of development economics from the 1950s to today, that we had for a long time very bold statements about the relationship between variables. You think of the Kuznets curve, inequality and growth and so forth, but eventually sort of starting in the 80s and very much accelerating into the 90s, we got the creation of the micro foundations of development. So Hicken has done a really fine job in building a more robust micro evidence base in all of its dimensions, not only the causes of conflict, but also very much the evidence and the topic of this conference building peace. And of course, I reflect on this because I got into an interest in working on conflict. Some over 30 years ago, I was in Mozambique during the transition from war to peace in the early 90s, and I was working with the poverty alleviation group in the Ministry of Finance in Mozambique. And we were working on the first post-war poverty reduction strategy. So we were trying to frame out how we could work, or we could move from humanitarian assistance through the war to transition phase where refugees were being resettled and then building poverty into the longer-term development strategy for Mozambique. And the thing that really struck me reflecting back on that was we actually had so little evidence, both at the macro level, but also particularly at the microeconomic level, about how conflict in Mozambique had affected people, how they were being affected by the war to peace transition, and really what their prospects were in the post-war recovery, particularly the loss of assets of land, of human capital and so on, which would lead to a very poor recovery for many of the chronically poor people in Mozambique. So the importance of microeconomic evidence, both data, but also causation, causal studies, and the integration of quantitative and qualitative evidence, when people say to me, well, economics, what does it bring to it? Isn't it about we're trying to stop conflicts, trying to stop war? Well, yes we are, but we really need that kind of information or analytical base to move ourselves through the humanitarian phase, through the war transition phase, and into the reconstruction and recovery phase, taking the poor with us. Because often, as we know from our own analysis, economies can grow quite strongly after conflict, but the poor are very much left behind. So the work of groups like Hicken and others is very vital to that. And at the time, I remember we sat around one afternoon in the poverty group in a very hot afternoon in Mozambique. And the question was being posed to us, what is the national poverty rate for Mozambique? We didn't know, there was no national household survey. There were at least two million refugees, IDPs flowing around. We didn't have much in the way of national accounts data. So, you know, we basically just came up with a number out of somewhere up there in the thin air. Two months later, I was in Washington at World Bank Meeting, turned on CNN TV channel, and there was our poverty number being quoted, you know, X% of people are now poor in Mozambique. So, you know, we're in a much better situation than we were around about that time. And of course, that's tremendously important, not just for the design of economic policy and the design of economic recovery, but it's also very important to the prosecution of the perpetrators of conflict, because we know as a group that conflict is not just about maiming and killing people, it's about leaving people hungry and distressed and ill-healthy and so forth and so on. Effects live through the generations. And it also strikes me that in some ways, the microeconomics of conflict and the work of Hicken and other groups, we're doing a very important job in writing the history of late 20th century and early 21st century conflict and war. Because, you know, if you think back to the history of conflict, we don't really know much about, at least I don't, about, say, the impact of the First World War, to take one example, on households, on people. You know, we have some fragmentary evidence. You know, we rely on poets and novelists, people writing in the 1920s to tell us these stories. I have family stories about the impact of the First World War on my family, but I don't really know how much impact it did have at the household level. So in some ways, the work that we're doing is very important and it's helping future historians write what has been a terrible history of the late 20th century and now a terrible history of the first 20 years of the 21st century. And that's, again, very important as current and future generations try and learn lessons about stopping conflict, helping people during war, helping people in the war transition and helping people in recovery. So, you know, that's another further reflection on the work of Hicken and others. I have many more points that I can make, but I think I'd like to just sort of cease my introductory remarks on that sort of historical point of view. Thank you, Tuma. Thank you very much, Tony. And of course, your work on Mozambique resonates very much. I think that's how we met originally in the 90s when I was doing my doctoral research on Mozambique and I was trying to estimate, in fact, just for one province up in the North Nampula, how many people were poor at that time based on this sample of data that some people in the Ministry of Agriculture had collected. And I scratched my head and I looked at the numbers again and again and again, but actually turned out they were all poor. All members of that household were below the official poverty threshold. That's how devastated the economy in that part of the country was. And maybe that does tell a narrative of why we still see violence or why we again see violence in northern Mozambique today. The people were left behind from where they were, unfortunately. And they were very much beyond markets to some extent and they weren't part of the economy and the little education they had made very little, if any, difference to their livelihoods at the time. And I fear some of it is still like that today, so... Yeah, I mean, those patterns of behaviour have been perpetuated through time. And to a degree, the conflict in Cabo de Gardo, we see, is a continuation of these themes, the continuing tensions between Arunama and Frolimo. You know, many of us at the time working on the design of the poverty alleviation strategy were very concerned, for example, about lack of access to land, natural resources, which have been a continuing source of conflict for the last 30 years. So, you know, again, this stuff resonates down through time. Yeah. Thank you, Tony. I'd like to invite status to share his thoughts next. Thank you. So, Tony's remarks about Mozambique brought to me... I thought that I had put aside one of the questions that Tillman asked us to reflect on had to do with books and works that were influential. And it's very difficult to remember, or exposed how your thoughts and your ideas were shaped when you began a project, especially when that goes back in time. So, in the late 90s, when I started working on the questions of the dynamics, the micro-dynamics of violence, which at the time was a very difficult to explain project, both because political scientists did not work on micro-dynamics. They worked exclusively on the cross-national level. But also because the question of violence was not distinct from the question of war. Political scientists, especially security specialists, tended to define war as collective violence and therefore couldn't see the difference between the two concepts. So, one of the books that really shaped my thinking in those early years, which I then forgot, but remember it again now, was a book on Mozambique. And it was a book by a French anthropologist named Christian Geoffrey called La Cosse des Armes Mozambique, which described, in fact, in extremely, I would say, in an extremely credible and fascinating way, how a movement, an armed group, the renama, which up to that point, everything I had read about described as a group of crazy people who were committing gratuitous violence without any kind of logic, actually operated. So it was not really a book that emphasized the collection of data in a systematic way, but provided a very insightful and a very compelling account of how a specific armed group came to connect with the civilian population. And part of that connection had to do with the understanding that people had of politics at the time, especially the longer term, the longer impact of the process and the policy of the legislation that the Frelimo government had imposed on Mozambique, which by destroying pre-existing ties created an opening for people to support in some way this movement. So a movement that was described at the time as being completely foreign-based, gratuitous in its violence, devoid of any politics, in fact, it turned out through this account, there was a much richer and interesting story and it was part of those readings that eventually led me to shift my project at the time from a political sociology of allegiances, understanding how people pick sides to a project in which I wanted to, in a sense, reverse the question to understand how violence was used in a way that eventually created long-term like loyalties or shifted people's loyalties. So in reflecting on this work on violence, I returned recently to a recent review paper that was authored by Eli Balcells and Jessica Stanton that reviews 20 years' worth of research on violence. And I sort of came out of reading this piece with two thoughts. The first one I was incredibly impressed by the amount of research that has been conducted on this topic in 20 years. There's been a proliferation of papers, of research projects, people have done an incredible amount of research on that topic. We know much more than we used to know 20 years ago. So there is definitely a sense of progress. At the same time, when I finished reading this paper, I felt even more confused about the topic that I know quite a lot about. So the proliferation of research is also producing a proliferation of findings. There is a proliferation of dependent variables. People study not just the level of violence that's exercised, but also the forms, the repertoires of violence, the combination of forms of violence and armed actors that use them in a variety of different places using data that is not necessarily comparable, concepts are not necessarily comparable. So we have, in a sense, to deal with an enormous amount of information and it's very difficult to make sense of that information. Another thing that I thought was that we are, in the past, the absence of data, what Tony described in a very sort of compelling way, forced us to be more creative, both in how we studied what we studied, but also in terms of theorizing the process that we were interested in. And I have the feeling now that the facility with which we can collect data has led to a sort of relative atrophy of the theoretical muscles, if you want, of our brains. And I'll give you an example. Think about how we model theoretically violence. One very simple way is to think there are two sides and they fight against each other. This is an understanding of the dynamics of violence that's very much reflective of the dynamics of interstate war, in which you have two states fighting against each other. But it turns out, especially, it's not a very good representation of interstate war, it's even less of a civil conflict. Why? Because the connection between armed groups and civilian and local populations is much more critical. And the need to understand that kind of interface matters very much. So in a sense, that complicates the theoretical modeling because it's not enough to study the clash between two groups. You also have to understand how those groups interact with the underlying populations. On top of it, you don't just have two groups. It's not just the state against another group. Very often, the state devolves a lot of authority to other actors. So one of the characteristics of civil conflicts is the fragmentation of monopoly of power sometimes in a willing way. So you have a variety of militias, but also you have a variety of rebel groups as well. And sometimes you have very violent, in a sense, wars within the war between competing rebel groups. So that complicates the process even more. Then, of course, the civilians are not a unified kind of population. Even a village is divided. People have different loyalties, different interests. There may be class, ethnic, or even political divides. Those divides can harden or can get reshuffled and transformed through the process of conflict. So you have a very dynamic model that, in a sense, is producing some of the data that we strive to interpret. And it's going to be very difficult, I think, to make sense of the data we collect. And we are going to collect at increasing levels using new techniques. And so I think it's very important to invest very much in the theorizing. So how can we do that? A couple of thoughts about that. One way is to understand the dynamics of conflict much better, which in part is the outcome of theorizing conflict better. But I think we have to also connect the micro dynamics to two other levels which have existed. One level is the macro study of conflict, which has existed independently for a long time. Another level is the meso dynamics of conflict. So on the meso level, we've had very interesting research recently. What is the meso level, understanding the groups? And there are two dimensions to groups. One is the connection between the group and the population that they just mentioned. But there is another one which has to do with the internal dynamics of the group. How is the command and control of a group organized? How is the administration of that group set up? How do groups recruit people? How do they train them? How do they incorporate them inside? How those groups then fragment, reconnect, coalesce, et cetera? The processes of defection between groups and between groups in the state, and so on and so forth. There is also a very lively area of investigation, which is very often described and called rebel governance, which has to do with how those groups then define and devise a set of policies which they impose on local population, sometimes in ways that are coercive, but sometimes in ways that mix coercion and other forms of association with locals. And then how those forms of governance then shape and impact the behavior of civilians. So that's the meso level. There is quite a lot of work that gets done, but that work also needs to be connected to the micro dynamics. And finally, how can the macro level be brought back into the equation? Well, it turns out that systemic factors have a very big impact on both the populations, but also especially the groups. What is going to be the ideology, for example, the political identity of groups is completely associated with systemic factors. The fact, for example, that between roughly 1950 and 1990, a great proportion of groups fighting civil wars across the world had a Marxist revolutionary socialist agenda and identity can only be explained by systemic factors by the Cold War. And so it's very difficult to say something meaningful if we ignore this kind of periodization. Very much the type of group and the type of dynamic that emerges in the post-Cold War period very often also referred to as the liberal international order, which is very much the kind of period that still informs our thinking, especially in the policy realm. The idea, for example, that our number one priority is to eliminate violence and war, is to get the parties to a conflict to settle, is to have international interventions, is to invest in peacekeeping. That is very much, I think, a characteristic that dominates in the period that starts in the early 1990s, but comes gradually to an end, it seems, starting in the early 2000s. Why? Well, because the September 11 attack and the military choices of the United States, especially in the area of the Middle East, unleash a new set of dynamics that seem to produce a new type of conflict that is not, for example, easily amenable to peacekeeping, that has actors that have a revolutionary ideology that didn't exist in the previous period, and that also produces conflicts that very often do not terminate with the settlement. So understanding those systemic dynamics and even pushing them into the past, for example, there is a period roughly between the beginning of the First World War and the end of the Second World War that's very much dominated by civil wars in Europe. The richest countries of the era produce, in a sense, parameters that define a lot of what we observe, and we think very often, is constant. So we need to be alert at that. So my general message, and I'm going to stop here, is that sometimes it pays to try to absorb a lot of what is going on, step back, and try to use different tools to try to better make sense of the data that we collect. Thank you, status. That's a very clear message, and it's encouraging to see that you also sometimes find it overwhelming all the evidence that gets put out there, overwhelmed by our own success, I suppose, if I can put it like that. But trust economists to reduce it down to some very simplistic models. So we come to your rescue if you need us. Anna Maria, can you come to our rescue, please? Yes, you have slides, wonderful, thank you. She works for the UN, she has slides, yeah? So I am the only one with boring slides, yes. But thank you, Patricia, Justino, and Union Wider for inviting me today. I'm really glad to be here. You organized a wonderful conference. And also congratulations to Tillman, and thanks to Tillman, Philip, and Patricia for creating Hicken. It has been a great place for us to talk about conflict and to help each other discuss our work and improve our work. What I'm going to do is somehow similar to what status this is to reflect on 20 years of research of forced migration, especially internal displacement. Through the lens of an economist, we sometimes tend to simplify too many things too much. We economists have been studying migration for quite a long time, and we know that migration really helps people improve their economic conditions to mitigate the impact of shocks and for several other reasons. And migrations have been really important, migration especially from rural to urban areas for economic development, to transition from agricultural economies to more sophisticated economies. And what the research on the microeconomic impact of migration, not of forced migration, has found is that migration indeed is an effective strategy of households to increase income, smooth consumption, and improve the welfare of migrants and their families. But during wars, migration is also important, and it's also a very important strategy and effective strategy to survive and meet a conflict. But in these cases, people are migrating to seek refuge and to protect their lives, and not necessarily to improve welfare conditions. In fact, sometimes it's a trade-off between welfare and the improvement of security. So what I do today in the presentation is to take most of the Hickin papers that have been done on forced migration and do like a summary of what we have learned. Not everything, because it's kind of overwhelming because we have a lot of papers on that, about 33% of the papers of Hickin are on forced migration for these many countries that I'm showing there. So contributions of the economic literature to understand migration in times of conflict is fairly recent. I would say that only during the last 20 years, despite the really rising trends that we have of forced migration. Today in 2020, we had 73 million people that were forced to migrate from their countries or within their countries. Most of them were internally displaced persons and this trend is intensifying as we speak as the UNHCR is now estimates that about four million Ukrainians were forced to flee from Ukraine and there is a lot of forced migration within the country as well. This rising trend of forced migration is really related to an increase on the incidence of internal conflicts. And after the end of the Cold War, what we saw is that there was an increase of interstate conflicts with respect compared to countries being fought between states. So during the last years, what we have seen is that the number of conflicts, interstate conflicts have intensified. So during 2020, we had 56 conflicts from and compared from 1991, that were 51 conflicts. But maybe we're going to have an important shift with the war in Ukraine currently. And differently than conflict between states and this is part of what status has studied in interstate wars where the combat lines are very clearly defined in interstate wars or wars fought inside the countries, these combat lines are not clearly defined. And what happens is that the population is highly victimized. In fact, a very important effort done by the Central Memorial Historic in Colombia to calculate the number of deaths during the conflict showed that 80% of the deaths in Colombia during more than 30 years were civilians and not combatants. This happens because armed groups attack the population to achieve war strategies. Some of them are to expand territorial control, to alienate the civilian population against the opponent group and to seize valuable assets and obtain valuable information among others. And as I say, what we find is that, for example, in Colombia, 80% of the population, 80% of the deaths were civilians. What happened with economists, and that's why I don't think we will be very good to solve the puzzle, Tillman, I'm sorry, had ignored forced migration for several years. And mostly we concentrated in economic migration and understanding economic migration. And the argument that economists gave, and this was published in the Handbook of Development Economics, so I'm not inventing this or interpreting it, is that forced migration was a political problem in which refugees and internally displaced person and IDPs were passive victims of conflict and war with little room for voluntary decisions. And what the microeconomic analysis of conflict, especially political science has shown and many of those are here in this room today, is that people and households do have agency. They adopt several strategies to survive amid violence and conflict and to re-interact with the armed groups. And migration is one of the strategies they adopt to minimize the impact of war and increase the chance of survival. So what I will concentrate today, and it's going to be short, don't worry, is that I'm going to discuss the recent literature on forced migration, the one that was published in the Hickin website. And then I will address the economic consequences very quickly and I'm going to concentrate on asset losses and labor markets. So although households are facing dire conditions and violence might be extreme, households in conflict areas make decisions, as I said, and they really behave strategically. However, what we have found is that violence and conflict really dominate the decision to migrate. But traditional economic incentives do play a role as well. This is what the literature on economic analysis of conflict shows. There is little quantitative evidence on the relation between violence and migration, but the initial studies in the 90s shows that time periods for Salvador and Guatemala, for example, show a strong correlation between migration and violence. And the recent micro-economic studies with household surveys show this is also the case. And what we find is really three regularities. As I said, violence is a strong correlate of the decision to migrate. And the second one is that violence is deliberately targeted against the civilians. So although there is some indiscriminate violence as well, we have a lot of deliberate targeting. So migration is not a random, is not random. Armed groups are behaving strategically. The population is behaving strategically as well and they are making decisions. So the people that migrate is a particular group of the population. The third regularity that we find is that traditional economic incentives also play a role. A lesser role, but they also play a role. On the one hand, we have traditional migration incentives that act as push and pull factors. So we have, for example, that the deterioration of economic conditions in conflict area, presumably due to conflict, pushes some households to leave in spite of not being direct victims of conflict. But violence may also reverse the traditional role of economic incentives. And we find these, for example, for a paper in Indonesia that was published a long time ago in the HIKI website. So there are, for example, there are deliberate attacks to the better of population and they leave. But usually with traditional economic incentives model, this is not happening. So it's reversing the role of these traditional economic incentives. And what is important is that there is a redistribution of the population along the territory that is not random. It's a redistribution that depends on economic characteristics of the household, social economic characteristics of the households, and political characteristics as well. So after the conflict ends, what we have in the territory is that there was a non-random redistribution of the population. And this is going to determine the opportunities for economic development when we are in a post-conflict period. I am tempted to end it there. You have time, that's fine. Yes? Yes, please. Okay, so I'll talk a little bit about the consequences of violence or of our conflict. There are many consequences, most are negative, but there are also some positive consequences of forced migration. But what we see is that migration is, forced migration is oftentimes quite hasty. So households leave behind assets, mostly productive assets when they arrive to the destination cities, they need to seek employment without the usual social networks to do so, and they don't have much access to risk sharing mechanisms. So the settlement process is quite difficult, it takes a long time, and this may create poverty traps that are difficult to overturn. So as I say, I'm going to concentrate on asset losses and labor markets. And what the evidence shows is that during conflict time, asset losses, as I said, of productive asset losses are quite high. And one example is Mozambique, as Toni said, but we find something similar in Rwanda, and we find something similar in Colombia as well. This is caused by the hastiness of the migration, but also because of the lack of rule of law in these conflict areas and the lack of protection of property rights, which really facilitates this illegal seizure of assets. But what is interesting is that asset restitution processes are also really an opportunity to redress these negative impacts of conflict and can become really an opportunity to promote economic development once conflict ends. And what is important is that these initial drops in income that people face initially are sometimes difficult to overcome because it's difficult to connect with labor markets, to access labor markets, because even though they migrate within the country, skills are not necessarily transferable, people don't have, they lose their network, so finding a job is more difficult, and labor markets are, in the first place, weak due to the conflict impact. However, and this is very important, on the positive side, forced migrants, since they perceive they are going to stay permanently, they invest more in the human capital of the region in where they are, so they are able to, after time passes by their conditions, improve significantly. Lastly, what I think it's important is that we also see a transmission of the impacts of forced migration on the locals, through prices, housing and food prices, for example, and through wages. Just think about wages. There is a large outflow of population that arrives in the destinations. Cities, for example, this is going to expand the labor supply, there is going to be more competition, and wages are going to go down. The effect is going to depend on the profile of the migrants, and it's going to depend as well on the profiles of the people in the destination areas, but what's going to happen is that some part of the population is going to be affected by this, and we find each time more convincing evidence that this is the case in many countries. So just a brief summary of what I said and three broad conclusions based on the literature, as I said, that has been published in the HIKI website. We do find, and this is a very important finding and I think for policy decisions as well, is that migration during conflict is not truly forced, nor truly voluntary. Voluntary people in conflict regions have agency and behave strategically, and armed groups behave strategically as well, although violence is a dominant factor, economic conditions also play an important role. And very importantly, migration can be an effective strategy to avoid victimization and survive in conflict times. This migration, however, implies really a large trade-off between the economic conditions and the improvements in security. And lastly, what is important as well is that many of these effects transmits into the destination location to prices and wages and through other general equilibrium effects. Thank you, Anna Maria. I think it's an excellent overview. And I think your first point, it's so obvious once one starts thinking about it that in times of conflict, moving is not just an issue for economic reasons, it's not just an issue for security reasons, but it's a combined. And therefore we need a combined analysis, accounting for both issues, and there may be others, like social, network, et cetera. But we need to have a combined analysis. On the one hand, policymakers find that so hard, right? I mean, all the debate in, for example, Europe is about either the poor war refugees who are only coming because of the war or the economic migrants who are just trying to get into our social systems. And this idea that there are multiple drivers and push and pull factors, et cetera, it's just too complex, it seems, for much of the political discourse, unfortunately. So from a policy perspective, we need the integration of these perspectives. But I think we do also need it from a sort of disciplinary research perspective so that we do justice to the questions in hand. And like Stata said there, there's a lot on the conflict side and the changing perspective, et cetera. And the economists, for example, through the Households and Confinect we have been pushing and invading and colonizing these sort of political science fields. But I think we need it in the reverse direction just the same way, right? So we can't do good economics if we're not informed by the good political science. So I think that's part of what we all like to practice, but which when we then battle with journal editors becomes sometimes very difficult. Thank you so much. All right, Philip, you also have some thoughts. And I think you're broadening this a little bit because I think you're gonna talk about some social issues and intra-household issues and welfare issues, right? All right, let me first say that it's such a pleasure to be at a large conference again and seeing old and new colleagues after this dreadful two-year period of COVID. It's a real pleasure to be involved in intellectual stimulating debates today and I'm sure also tomorrow. I'm really benefiting of it. I get intellectual stimulus with talking with many of you. Now, when I reflect upon 20 years of micro-level research that we have done in the Households in Conflict Network, it's very difficult to make a choice because we have contributed on so many domains that it was really not easy to make a choice. But when I have to pick a few of them, I'd like to start with the distributional consequences of exposure to violent conflict. And what I mean with that is I would like to illustrate that on the Ukrainian-Russian war that's going on at the moment. Imagine that you're a 35-year-old engineer just before the conflict working in Eastern Ukraine. The war occurs and you cannot work anymore. You lose your job and you're drafted into the army, right? And maybe you can use your skills as an engineer but more importantly, you had your education behind you and when the war is over and you survived the war hopefully, you can contribute to the reconstruction of your country because you have the human capital, right?  Contrast that with a person who was at the same place, 16, 17-year-old, who he or she sees the school bond and cannot finish his or her education and is forced to flee the country. That's a whole other perspective and that's the cohort perspective. Maybe for a few years, you're not able to finish your high school and so when the war ends, you are maybe without a high school degree and you cannot contribute maybe to the reconstruction of your country. Maybe you want to finish going to school before you can actually contribute to the country so you lose a year, maybe two, maybe three years of education and that's different from the engineer who's 35-years-old. So you are more affected at 16, 17 than at 35. You're heavily affected in your human capital accumulation.   We found in the Houses in Conflict Network in many research that this is heavily affecting your future human capital accumulation, excuse me, starting with nutritional deprivation. So you will be sick for many months. You will not have enough food. You're traumatized as a baby and this will heavily affect you not only in the next few months compared to the 16, 17-year-olds but it will affect you throughout your life because as a young child, we know when you're affected as a very young child by violence, by trauma, you will be finding the consequences of that throughout your life in a less developed anxious brain. Maybe you are stunted. You will not reach the statute that you have and throughout our long-term research, we know that will have long-term implications on human capital accumulation, on the income that you will earn and potentially also on the way you will raise your own child because you will be anxious. And so this is the one first distributional consequence of exposure to conflict is at the cohort level. Compare the 35-year-old with the 16-year-old with the two-year-old and you see how different they are affected by the exposure to conflict and it's one task, one skill of the economists also to point out to these distributional effects of conflict. These same distributional effects can not only be found at the cohort level but also at the gender level. Again, looking at the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, see how different men and women are affected by the conflict. The Ukrainian presidency does not allow able men to leave the country. They have to fight. They have drafted into the war and they're sending their daughters, their wives to other European countries for safety. So the wives, the daughters are in safety. They are going to school. Maybe they learn German. They may learn Polish. They may learn Dutch. They may learn English. Where their men are fighting the war. What does that mean for the years coming to the war? And they have completely different experience. The women are living in anxiety because what's going to happen to their men but at the same time, maybe they can advance their human capital accumulation. They can take care of their children while their brothers and their fathers are fighting against the Russians. As with the gender effect. Again, a task of economists is to look at the distributional consequences of exposure to war. Take again another distribution. The effect is at the Russian side. We know that thousands of Russian soldiers have died in Ukraine but very few, almost none of them come from the Moscow area. They all come from smaller regions at the outskirts of the empire. They are Chechens. They are from Siberia. They are from ethnic minorities. Those guys are sent to the war to die and none of them at the regional level around Moscow. Again, a distributional consequences of war is who are you sending to the war? Are there the elite troops? No, they are the poor guys from the outskirts of the empire. Those are going to be fought in the war. Maybe that's one reason why Putin has still so much support for the war because none of the people around the elite in Moscow suffers from the war. The suffering occurs by the regions outside of the empire. And so one can look at other types of distributional effects, for example, along the poverty non-poverty access. In my work on Burundi and Rwanda, partly with Patricia Justino, we have looked at the distributional consequences of exposure to war. Who is losing land? Who is losing assets? Are these the poor? Are these the non-poor? The same work has been done in the Colombian case where we find it's not only the poor who are affected by violent conflict. The non-poor can also lose their assets because they're exposed. They maybe even have a specific profile that they make them very attractive to rebels, stealing cattle, for example, to finance the war effort. So the distributional consequences of war along the poor, non-poor access can be very important. Can be also important in Ukraine. I don't have data on that, but definitely in the developing countries that we are studying, this is an important access. And who is losing out of war? Who is winning from war? And I think it has been a contribution by many researchers in the Households in Conflict Network over the past 20 years to look at those distributional consequences. And this has large consequences also for policymaking. We know that when the war ends, 10, 15 years down the line, the country most usually be at the trend of macroeconomic growth that it used to have before the war. That takes about 10, 15 years, exactly because many funds are being channeled through the country for reconstruction. So at the macroeconomic level, the country will be back on tracks about 10 years later. But that does not mean everything is okay in the country. Those people at a young age who have lost out their parents, who can't go to school, who are very sick during the war, who may be lost on arm or a leg, or may be blind. Those people, they don't really care about this macroeconomic level. They know that their situation has been worsened for their entire lives. And so even when the country is back at its macroeconomic growth level, there are a lot of microeconomic traumas from the war who should be addressed by policymaking, by a fine-tuned policy. For example, if you lose your parent, if you lose two parents, then maybe you can finance your studies because you know that nobody will be able to pay for your studies. And so we need to fine-tune policy specifically at these levels of distribution, these fine-grained levels because people are differently affected by the war. And I think part of the task of economists and also our skill is to show policymakers that it's not one size fits all, but it really has very specific consequences depending on your age, depending on your court, depending on your gender, depending on the profession you had before the war, depending on your welfare, you will be differently affected by the war. And I think that's one thing we have been doing many for the last few years in the Hicken Network. When I want to mention something else is also, I think especially during our working papers series and the annual conferences that we have is to offer a platform to graduate students. I think that's one of the key things we have been doing for many, many years. It's like one-half to three-fourth of the persons that coming to our conference are PhD students who are given a platform for the first time to present their work to colleagues. And I think we have been benefiting so much from advancing, from stimulating, from supporting a new group, a new cohort of PhD researchers that work on these issues. And we welcome them because when we started the network, nobody was really working on these issues and we had to support one another. Now they can see that there are hundreds of researchers working on these issues and that stimulates them. Let's say, hey, we can work on that. And I always tell my graduate students, okay, here you can work on data, but when you do that, you also need to become a country expert, study the history of the conflict, study the anthropology, study the political economy. Just don't look at data.  And that makes you part of the country. You as a research become part of the history of the country and you take a role as researcher, but maybe also as an advisor in the future, you're going to care for that country. And that's, I think, a very valuable role that I also want to mention to graduate students how important it is to become country experts and to engage in the country and not just do your econometric analysis. I think I will leave it there tomorrow. Okay, excellent. Thank you very much, Philip. In fact, some of the nicest moments that our HICN workshops have been when graduate students start presenting and they pause on slide two and they say, no, to this audience, I don't have to explain why I can study conflict as an economist. And they forward and then they go into the actual analysis and then for the first time they're in a community where it's allowed to just unashamedly study these issues. When you talk about all these heterogeneous impacts, I think one thing that is also important to bear in mind is that some conflicts even have impacts way beyond the location of where the fighting takes place. I mean, it could be in the neighboring countries, it could be in the countries that, like you said, in the Russian case, you're not fighting at the moment, it's in Ukraine, but it could be all over Russia. But in this case, it could even be all over the world economy through rising fuel prices, rising food prices. So the impacts of the conflict are often not necessarily global, but at least much more geographically widely spread and leading to further inequalities in outcomes as a result of the violence. And perhaps going one step further still is the interaction of the violence and violent conflict and the impacts of the violent conflict with other global challenges, like, for example, climate change. I think that's something that we in the field are increasingly noticing that in Syria, in the Sahel zone, in Lake Chad area, in northeast Nigeria, we see these climate change conflict interactions which reinforce each other and create really wicked problems yet, which are really hard to study, but they're also hard to solve. So I think that's also very important. Thank you so much. We have heard a lot about what we have done in the last 20 years, and that's fantastic. With the benefit of hindsight, some of it seems quite obvious, perhaps. You know that these impacts are the way they are, that these topics are important. So I was wondering if any of you have any examples of counter-intuitive findings that you have found in your reading or in your writing or surprising findings, you know, things that maybe didn't go along with your political science or your econ backgrounds at first sight. Tillman, I have one. Yes? Counter-intuitive finding, which is also probably, I think the most important counter-intuitive finding that most people don't know which needs to be advertised. And this is that in the context of conflict, the incidence of a violent event is not a good indicator of the level of conflict. This is a very big problem because a lot of studies use violent incidents as a measure of how acute a conflict is in a particular area. And the reason this is not a good indicator is that within a conflict-ridden country, you may have areas that are, for example, controlled in full by a rebel organization or an armed group that are totally peaceful. Precisely because an armed group is able to establish a monopoly of violence means that those areas are going to be peaceful. So the fact that on aggregate, you don't find violence in those places does not mean that the conflict has subsided or that the trend is going well. So that, I would say, is a sort of point that a lot of people tend to ignore, especially people who are not familiar with conflict, but use data and then use these indicators then to correlate or to predict other variables as an incidence of conflict. I suppose the point is that the expectation of violence drives behavior and not necessarily the realization of it, right? So at least some behaviors. Well, certainly behaviors in places that are without open violence, but the threat of violence is very much present. That is going to shape, obviously, behavior. For example, decisions about migration may not take place directly as a result of violence, but in terms of calculations about how things may change given the prevalence of a particular type of rule. Maybe we should be measuring the anticipation of violence or the expectation of violence rather than occur. Well, I think one of the things we should be measuring that we're not measuring very well is territorial control in situations of conflict. And the reason we're not measuring as much is because it's very difficult to measure, much more difficult than incidents. So if you look at studies on Afghanistan or Iraq in which the United States was collecting and disseminating a lot of the SIGAC data set, for example, those were the ones that were used by researchers, whereas we didn't really have easily available data about the level, the type, the kind of control that was exercised in particular locality. Yeah, thank you. Ana Maria, you have another one. Yes, no, I have a follow-up to studies intervention, because when you measure violence and you try to measure the presence of armed groups or the control that the armed groups exert on the community or the rebel governance that the armed groups are able to implement in the community, the effects of conflict are very different. So for example, a paper that we wrote with Patricia and that we have been working for a while, what we find is that presence of armed groups, and we don't know what the presence is entailing, but the presence of armed groups is increasing participation in community organizations, we believe because of capture of those organizations, whereas violence is decreasing participation in organizations. Or other work that we're doing with Ana and with Patricia, where we try to be very, really measure at the microeconomic level what does conflict imply, has a lot of consequences on the decisions that people make in not necessarily in anticipation of violence. It's also a response, a strategic response to the behavior of armed groups that make them behave in a certain way. So I would say it's not only anticipation of violence, but something much more complex. I have an example, perhaps, of work that I've done for our colleagues at the World Bank, and I think they're here in the room, Lucia and Diana, where we did a small case study of displaced people in Darfur, and we found that the girls who were displaced by the conflict but who arrived in the displacement camp in a safe area as young girls had a chance at catching up at their education, which they wouldn't have had back home in rural areas if they hadn't been displaced. And so it hesitate to speak about the positive impact of forced displacement, but there are certainly some benefits associated with it, which we didn't anticipate, but they then later have a completely different trajectory in the sense of the way maybe Philip outlined, but that was very encouraging to find. So. And just to maybe, if I can continue to that. Please. What I didn't expect because maybe I wasn't aware of maybe some sociology literature was the potential positive aspects of a war, namely the increase of in-group cohesion. If you go through a dreadful experience, it's an empirical question, what's gonna happen with your local community after the war? Is everybody gonna be everybody's enemy or it's gonna be a lot of solidarity and in-group cohesion? And it turns out we find evidence in many countries that indeed a few years after the war, these communities are more cohesive. There's more solidarity in the community a few years after the war. And of course that depends on the nature of the conflict, on the length of the conflict, on how long after the conflict you are measuring these cohesions, but at least that's something that I didn't expect. It's an open, it's an empirical question of what are the long-term effects of conflict? At least there seems to be some indication there are positive pro-social outcomes, at least at the in-group level, not necessarily at the out-group level, for communities who went through the dreadful experience of war. There is also all this recent literature on the war as a great leveler, the Piketty argument about war increasing equality by destroying wealth. As you mentioned, the historical sociology argument, still is another's war as a factor of increasing nation building. What we're seeing in Ukraine, for example, is the formation of very strong national identity. And of course there is all the work by American historians and political scientists, David Mayhew, for example, who argued and provided evidence that all the progressive reforms, the most important progressive reforms in the United States were the results of major wars. So would that, you know, to go back to a point about policy relevance, should we advise policy makers to make war in order to achieve progress? What would you say? Given the evidence. And, you know, we should be producing evidence-based policy. Well, maybe staying with the evidence-based policy. Tony, you have been sort of going in and out of UN meetings for the last, what, 20 years or so, yeah? So where does this work get traction in your view? How has, or if at all, this is maybe the moment to reflect it critically, yeah? What part of this agenda actually has a policy relevance as opposed to just us finding it interesting and counterintuitive? Well, I think it has immense policy relevance in the sense that, you know, when you're designing a reconstruction program or a war transition program in country, you know, you get ideas from, say, a group of people like this and you get 100 ideas at least, or 1,000 ideas, yeah?   And to a degree, you know, the suggestions that come forward in the ideas will reflect lobbying, sometimes by quite well-sourced, well-funded groups, which is desirable, you know, every's in the conversation there. But, you know, you can then end up with a sort of program that, you know, like has 500 great things you want to do for the poor. And then you look at the resources you've got and you can maybe do 20 of those well. So, you know, the tendency then is you just sort of spread them around, you know? And, you know, there's a great danger you won't actually achieve much at all. But there's also a danger in the sense politically that if you're not concentrating on the really top issue, so, for example, in terms of reconstruction from conflict in Africa, the role of land, access to good quality land in allowing households to plow and then, you know, to secure their own food security but also then to grow their household economy and then to fight the post-war. That's absolutely paramount, right?  And this was a discussion we had in Mozambique. And the trouble is politically, the nefarious political actors, the actors that are just interested in grabbing what they want for themselves, have a very simple agenda. So in some ways, you know, this kind of great splodge of objectives and fine statements by the UN, the World Bank and everybody else kind of assist them in doing that because you don't hit the one issue that you should be hitting. For example, access to land, you know, imperfect tenure, making sure the land laws protect the poor environmental access to assets and so forth. So I think that's something we've learned from the national system. I don't say that's easy, but you know, it's kind of from what I've observed on country operations. I think at the sort of higher level of the UN, the sort of New York level, I say this because I'm not in the UN anymore, it's kind of, you know, the UN particularly has a terrible tendency to want to say, we're going to achieve all objectives with one instrument. You know, we're going to get peace, security, environmental security, you name it, water access from one simple kind of instrument.  If we just solve the problem of growth, we'll solve it, you know. So it's what I call the kind of one-arm bandit theory of development or conflict.  And all the money comes out. You know, all the good things arrive all at once. And you know, it just doesn't work like that. So I kind of think, you know, well, the international system should kind of take on more of that nuance, but that's where the research side comes in. That's where the research says, actually guys, there's a real tension between your objectives. You should go for these 10. We think they'd be the most effective. We've talked to the communities, our anthropologists, our household surveys. They have the highest returns. You can argue against those for political reasons. It might be very good political reasons for peace while, you know, why you go for a second best reconstruction strategy. But then at least when you've got the data and the evidence and all the analysis on the table, then you can have a constructive discussion. Without the data and the analysis on the table, you can just make up the facts. You know, I made up the fact about poverty in Mozambique 32 years ago, trying to be helpful.  So I think that's where, you know, we play a role. It's an important role. Just one correction on the one-armed bandit. In one out of a thousand cases, actually a lot of money does come out, yeah? Yeah. So you just need a sample of a thousand one-armed bandits and then you'd like to have a success story, yeah? So that's, I think, the political economy of it, yeah? But, you know, that's also a problem. I mean, right through development economics, you know, we always have these discussions about just get the industrial policy right. If we have this project, it'd be great. And I always say to that, well, yeah, okay, that's fine. But, you know, we have all the microeconomic evidence on the returns to education, returns to health, primary health care. Why don't we just spend the money on it? You know, because we have a very low risk, probably, of failure. So, you know, some people who work on, my colleagues who work on health and education say, it's pretty naive, Tony. But I've seen so many rotten agricultural and industrial projects that I think, we've got a fairly high probability of success if we just spend money on, you know, rural female education. And Anna Maria? Yes. I was thinking while hearing you, Tony, that it's also very important that we as researchers and especially economists to be a little bit critical of ourselves, no? Because we tend always to try to say that evidence-based policy is very important and we provide evidence for that.  Where we say, you have to do this intervention. We do a random control trial. And then we show that this improved, I don't know, increased education. And then we have a lot, a host of very small interventions where we have strong evidence, but somehow we are forgetting the context of each country. And we are forgetting the context of each country when we are doing those interventions where we are doing the random control trial. And we are also forgetting the dynamics and the political dynamics of the society at the end of the different community groups. So there is a lot of where the context and the politics and what's happening and the tensions within the community that's really going to determine once you really scale up the project and once you are distributing funds for that and doing because you are favoring some people and not the other. So that's where I think you ask a question about research silos. That's where I think we economists and political sciences can work together to understand a little bit better what we're doing. And talking too much about evidence-based policies somehow gives me like, okay, but we are forgetting that societies go through political processes and need to go through democratic processes and decisions are not so straightforward as we think they are. So I think that's also very important that that's a self-refraction of what I have done during the years, but I think it's very important. Is that particularly important in the either conflict affected or post-conflict settings? Is that the point? Or like bringing it back to our household and conflict network lessons? Is that a... I was thinking and also being critical of myself for example of what happened in Colombia during post-conflict time. So we signed the peace agreement. We had a lot of information. We had done a lot of research economists and political scientists showing what was important about peace, why we should have peace and what derailed peace was not that we didn't have that evidence-based and that it was not that we had disseminated it, but it was there were a lot of political tensions that we were not taking into account when we were doing those analysis. So that made me very critical of what we do sometimes. Thank you. There's one more topic I'd like to address you on the panel before we open up to the audience and that's sort of going back to our roles as researchers and looking at the field and not necessarily the next 20 years, but where are we heading? Philip, do you have a sense? We need to study the inequalities. Fine. Message heard. But you're doing that. Others are doing that. That's good. So what's the next step or the next topic that I would like to address? I think we should pay careful attention to in this Households and Conflict Network research area. I think it has to do also with the stage where you are in your career as a researcher.  You have to come up with innovative methods that I didn't know existed. Or that I did not use when I was working on my dissertation or that are newly developed and I think that's great that young aspiring researchers take the risk of doing that for their dissertations.  I think we should do more policy advice because we have 20 years of research experience behind us. I think for us it's maybe okay to talk about some new methods but I think at our stage and Ana Maria is a good example of this going from academia to policy is really also our task is to talk to governments, to talk to international organizations what do we think that research can contribute to policymaking. I'm not really doing really innovative research at the moment but I'm supporting graduate students who come up with some new method or some new idea and I try to help other researchers or professors at this stage in their career and I think what will happen in the next 10-15 years is being developed by graduate students right now rather than by a professor like me. Sounds maybe strange because I would be should be at the height of my career be very innovative at the moment but I have so much other things to do that I maybe lack time to be really creative and innovative as I was maybe 15 years ago. That's an honest answer. Thank you. Let me just ask each of you. Ana Maria, do you have something to add? No, I think Philips advice is quite wise. I do believe it's very difficult to say besides what we have been talking about which other topics that we should concentrate on. I do believe that researchers need, it's kind of a decentralized process where the research of the important topics start to emerge and there is not this visionary saying look now we have to go this way or this way. I do believe that the young people and the young researchers do come up with so innovative things and so interesting things like the workshop that we went on Thursday and Friday that let them do it and we enjoy what everything is doing. Okay and we go into politics right Stases? Well I mean it's very difficult to disagree with everything that has been said before. I would add that you know along with the challenge and the excitement of new methods is the danger of every new method being a new fad of believing that there is a silver bullet that is going for the first time to give us the entire truth, the ability to shape everything we tend to forget that we are in the social sciences unlike the hard sciences we are in a sense studying ourselves we are part of what we study people are strategic even if we have a successful intervention it's going to produce winners and losers which is called politics and then the losers are going to find ways to work against some of the you know positive effects change the dynamics produce unintended effects so we are facing a situation here in which you know even the best innovations do not seem to be producing the sort of definitive predictions and laws that we have in other sciences and so that you know we have to keep that in mind and if we keep that in mind productively I think that can produce some humility not necessarily believing that every new development is going to open up you know previous people have not and at the same time it's an opportunity as I said before when you lack certain things you are forced to develop different types of creativity different types of expertise which I think are necessary I don't think that for example to go back to Philips point something that has been denigrated a lot in political science the idea of area studies or area expertise because today you go say in Kenya tomorrow in Thailand and the day after in Timor but at the same time there is value to really becoming an expert in a specific place or a region understanding knowing the languages having a deeper familiarity with a particular place unfortunately these things are not necessarily always parallel to professional incentives so professional incentives academically tend to favor innovation at the expense of those other skills and also I would say at the policy realm there is a tendency and attention policy makers want silver bullets they want solutions that are going to be fast visible effective which then lead people to offer them what they demand and when that fails of course nobody is there to pick up the cost I don't think we've had a discussion about Afghanistan which to my mind is probably the most resounding policy failure of our times is a case in which enormous resources were invested there were all kinds of innovative methods used to introduce and test policy solutions that eventually didn't produce what they were supposed to be producing and I don't hear a discussion about that Tony do you have a final thought before we opt for Q&A? I think in terms of new research initiatives and topics I'm currently working on oil gas and mining resource flows so I'm particularly fascinated in basically the high income clans or families that control those assets and in many ways they control those assets because they've captured the state and it's a feature of capture state capture sometimes falling conflict that they got what they wanted you know they got control of the asset, the natural resource the oil, the gas or the mineral resource and they're quite happy then to have peace because they turn themselves from a roving into a stationary bandit basically but these are transnational networks now facilitated very much by the advanced world by the bankers and the lawyers and the public relations people operating in very sophisticated ways and to a degree the work we've been doing there's a project we have at WIDA on illicit financial flows but also on the extractive industries is looking for example at the use of the Paradise Papers data around savings and so forth because you know high level corruption particularly high level corruption at the state level or just simply theft you know is a very very good indicator of a society that's well certainly not going anywhere developmentally but it's also probably got a very high probability of conflict I mean it's very hard to research but you know you see and it's not just you know academics you see a lot of very creative investigative journalists now looking on the stuff and of course the situation with Russia and Ukraine you know is kind of dug out all kinds of things from the woodwork but it's not just Russia and Ukrainian oligarchs it's you know Nigerian Angolan you know whatever oligarchs it's the same issues and you have a sort of feedback loop because you have structures of facilitation armies of lawyers, investment bankers allow those things and it's also important to understand this because we take the instruments we have for example the Foreign Corruption Practices Act of the United States you know very serious fines have now been issued under that you know commodity traders have been fined $200-$300 million but that doesn't really matter they just carry on you know the corruption from their side fines a home so in terms of you know the actual sort of policy how to attack the problem we need to kind of know more about the structure of incentives what constitutes a punishment for some of these guys those are good economics questions again and maybe that's part of what I think Sat Sri said earlier also how do we go back up to the macro so maybe that's also part of that agenda now that we've documented in a sense the human suffering and the causal mechanisms behind it how do we aggregate that back up and to the weak institutions at the top level at the local level so that's interesting thank you very much I would like to open the floor for questions maybe we can collect three and a go and then we see where the panel wants to respond and very briefly the ground rules if you can briefly introduce yourself and be relatively concise in your question please that allows us to have lots of responses we start with Anke on my right and then I stay on the right just now and then all the way at the back and then we do another round after that so can you just raise your hands again to the other two if you just check the next person there with the mask Anke, Herfler University of Konstanz happy birthday household and conflict network I've been a consumer rather than sort of close collaborator on it because as you know I'm much more known for my cross-country work so I would like to suggest a little bit of a research area and would love to hear what you think so with the SDGs we've got some complementary goals so for example if we've got less poverty we've got less conflict and if we've got less conflict we've got less poverty but there are also SDGs that are in a direct opposition and this is how I see it maybe you see it differently so for example with having a more sustainable global economy we will have more battery technology and we need to mine more rare earths and these rare earths are mined in areas where there's a lot of conflict or it sort of exacerbates the conflict and so connecting the micro with the macro here these are some of the things that we need to be aware of make sure that the greening of the global economy isn't going to exacerbate local conflicts thank you. Okay, thank you very much and the second question please. Hi, my name is from CGR Focus on Climate Security I was wondering whether climate has been one of the factors that has been covered enough in these 20 years of studies if not whether the intersection between climate, socio-economic risks that drivers of conflict and conflict themselves whether this could be also the next research area that you think will be valuable investing in our time and then I have a second question directly to Anna Maria in your research on migration and conflict at least from the presentation seems like we've focused mostly on the direction from conflict to migration but this is the evidence also on the reverse connection so the impact of forced migration on conflict in the places of destination and how is this connection, this next is also affected by climate so please I'll now thank you very much thank you and then I have a third question for the web bank I want to come back on the conflict-related or measurement issues or what do you think about constructing an index which do not only capture the violence but increase the measurement bias or reduce it. Thank you. Did you hear that question? We didn't hear you very well, unfortunately. Something with the microphone. Could you just say it again, please, about an index? Okay. Can you hear me better? Yes. Yeah. Okay. I was asking about the conflict-related measures. So what do you think if we construct an index which does not only capture the violence, but all conflict-related events, so violence, crime, attacks, the destruction of building, do you think that the index will increase the measurement bias or reduce it? Thank you. Okay. Thank you. I think we caught it now. Philip, would you like to start? Sorry. I can start with the last two questions. So in an index, it's always the question, what element of the index is driving the effects? And when we're going to put violence from, let's say, from rebels or from armies together with ordinary crime, together with drug-related crime and things like that, we're going to make a potpourri out of it and we're not going to know exactly what's going to drive the effect. So I was in favor of always singling out the type of violence that we are studying. And at some of our conference, we had papers on crime. And so we are not exclusively working on violent conflict, but we are also open, for example, to the effect of Mexican violence caused by drug-related crime. And so definitely we are interested in studying that, but I wouldn't make an index, I think, where I put all kinds of violence together to see what then the aggregate effect is of the level of, you know, aggregate violence in the country. I don't think that makes much sense. And on the climate question, if I may, so the network really works bottom up. So we look at what is of interest to the people we are working with and we leave a lot of leeway to the local organizer of the subsequent conferences to come up with teams. And definitely climate is on our agenda, I'm sure in the next few years there will be a Hicken annual workshop where we study the effect of climate and conflict. Of course there are other scores already contributing to this literature and we have in our working papers series of papers on drug-related matters on climate that is already there, although to my knowledge it hasn't been the team of an annual conference yet, but it does not mean that it's not on our agenda. What I think is interesting about the climate and conflict nexus is that it's very well established that there is a nexus or even a causal relationship from certain climate events to conflict, violent conflict, but that the mechanisms are so hotly debated. And that's much less clear and in a sense much more interesting because take the El Nino phenomenon, which is part of these science and nature papers, right? You know, when it's really hot, I mean do you really want to go out and fight? I mean fighting is a really physically difficult activity, yeah? And you really rather stay in your barracks and drink a cold beer, yeah?  It's completely illogical why that would happen in the first place, yeah? So there must be something going on, whether it's reduced crops or whether it's, you know, I mean there's many mechanisms, I don't want to repeat it now, but I'm just saying I think it's a great empirical puzzle, yeah? Lots of good research is being done on it, but in a sense establishing the causality was much easier than understanding it, yeah? Ana Maria, you were also directly interested. Okay, I will talk about climate and conflict and climate and migration. I do believe that's a very important issue to study. In fact, you find there are many papers that show a strong relation between migration and climate. But there we really don't know well what are the mechanisms that are causing that. Is it crop failure? Does it have to do something with labor markets in these regions? Or what else is driving the migration that is related to climate? So there is a host of things that we can study there. There is already people studying it. We finished just a few weeks ago a study in El Salvador where we find that indeed the climate caused migration through the reduction of agricultural production and through the contraction of the labor demand. About how this affects conflict, this migration, I haven't seen many studies of that and I think that's very important because we will have much more migration due to climate. And this is going to reconfigure and redistribute the population not only inside the countries but crossing internationally and we do have to understand a little bit better. Are we going to talk about climate refugees?  What's going to happen inside the countries? I think those are a lot of important questions that we need to start discussing right now. And lastly, on that, I think it's very important because climate change was caused primarily and now it's caused also by developing countries but by developed countries. But the countries that are bearing the brunt of the effect are developing countries that are causing this migration. So what is the global share of the responsibility of this? So there are a lot of very interesting questions that we should start analyzing. Thank you. Any other replies or... Well, I mean, Anka raises a fascinating question. It goes back to sort of kind of the... I would say it's a big... Well, there's an issue with the SDGs which is again coming back to my point that in the UN systems the tendency to believe that all good things can be achieved together. And there is a tension particularly between the energy poverty goal and the generalized poverty goal and the climate goals because in many countries we do not have the renewables to achieve that. If you ask the president of Rwanda what's he going to do? He's going to go for coal and gas likewise the president of Uganda, right? Because they want to reduce poverty and that's where we are. But the energy transition is going to affect conflict in at least three ways. One of which is it's going to affect the fiscal base of the state. It's going to affect the fiscal base of the state of the oil and gas producers eventually because the oil and gas will strand. It will become commercially valueless. And the debate within the oil and gas sector is at what point that happens. At the moment they're making out with the bonanza. You know, the gas price is a big high but it collapsed during the pandemic. How is that going to be managed? What ramifications is that going to have for elites who have been very dependent on the control of those natural resource rents both for their own wealth accumulation but also for mobilizing support for their political agenda in society. On the other side of the coin, the rare earth you mentioned but also the nickel, the cobalt, the lithium, all the rest of it, that's another bonanza. All the projections are prices are going up and they're going up long term. So who controls the resources? And again you'll see that's going to affect the fiscal basis of the state and therefore the politics of the state and the ability of the state to mobilize support to actually reduce poverty through the distribution of those rents in a good way. And that's going to set off all kinds of interesting political dynamics which some of which could be very unfavorable because you know, the one thing that we know from resource booms is they can be handled terribly and you'll work with Paul Collier two decades ago who was illustrating the role of natural resources in conflict. So that's the first one. The second one basically goes to the personal wealth of the elites in the way that they control these natural resources but they're pretty smart, they'll diversify. You're in oil and gas at the moment, you're in mining, you get into property, you get into financial wealth. The smart oligarch is the diversifying oligarch.  So there's going to be all kinds of interesting dynamics there. But thirdly, there's going to be the community dynamics of mining but also of oil and gas are still pretty terrible. I mean we've improved in the last 20 years in helping communities to manage the local impact of these large investments in mining and other resource extraction but there are still some terrible things that go on. And that's a real problem around localized conflict. One reason, because I work on these issues now, one reason why people just don't want to go anywhere near the oil, gas and mining sector as a development issue is they just see the whole thing as toxic, toxic for climate, toxic for the environment, toxic for communities. And yet we're all sitting here which is running on rare earths, lithium, cobalt and all the rest of it an energy system that's being supplied by whatever it is, coal, gas, etc. So this is a dimension of the climate and energy debate that isn't really coming out yet but it's a major, major set of issues because you think about the conflicts that were set off 100 years ago ultimately by the transition from horsepower to the use of oil. That then fed into these systemic factors that roll through the 20th century. So it's not all good news. Just on the point of the broader aggregate index of conflict and violence my thought is, well, economists we produce GDP which amalgamates together all kinds of things and then we argue about should this be in it or should that be in it. So we do produce that aggregate and it's treated very importantly but again I think we'd have an issue with the human development system. It's like the human development index. How do we weight it? If we've got some consensus then yeah, we'll do it. I always think that the happiness index is the easiest one to aggregate at all but let's have another round of question. There's Geel, then behind Geel and then third one from the back in this group and then later I come back to you for a third round. So concise questions, concise answers we manage. Thank you. Geel. I have one question as we celebrate almost 20 years of the household in conflict network and Philip you mentioned investing now more on research policy transfer, research practice transfer. My question is what has been the major successes in transferring interesting insights to influence policy and practice and I was particularly struck by the examples of different people of different age gender regions of Ukraine and how conflict actually impacts them and what is the immediate vulnerability but what are the long-term consequences and for me now with the human internal organization of course this should inform the way we go about investing, supporting livelihood protection programs both by being sometimes more systemic so going for instance in Ukraine to support massively the ministry of social policy and social protection programs strengthening this but also outside of this program how much directly should we intervene to really look after very specific categories of people and I'm very intrigued about how much success you got and maybe a very small but tricky question for status. I was really appreciating the fact that you said it's important to look also at systemic shifts from the Cold War to the liberal peace to new form of revolutionary thinking leading to protracted conflicts and if I can push you a bit on Singh today whether we are yet at another critical juncture of systemic shifts towards maybe the return of big power politics or if this is just another layers adding to other layers which makes things too complex maybe a bit what we discussed with so many different variables that you know it becomes extremely difficult to do appropriate foresight for planning. Can you just pass it to the back? Thank you. Thank you. My name is Helen from the French Development Agency. Thank you for showing all the piece of work that has been put together. It's really impressive during these 20 years and happy birthday. I had a question beyond the research production did you have any ambition of constructing capacities of local researchers strengthening capacity of data producers within this network and could you eventually tell a word of their achievement in this endeavor. Thank you. Thank you very much and then there was a third question for Mike. Okay. Thank you very much of these interesting presentations. My name is Iram Ali Muska Lahti and I'm working with University of Eastern Finland here in eastern part of Finland and I would like to comment on this question about the climate migration, climate changes because it's actually discussed quite a lot of in political sciences and use research and it's actually the term which is we need to be quite careful. What is actually the reasons why for example young people from western part of Africa is leaving now. As the sciences also quite easily use this for a climate migration at climate refugees when it actually the researchers who have been working especially in the western Africa they have recognized that the reasons are very multi faced and it's not only the climate but also what is happening with the democratic institutions there. What is actually the use of this debate? The various actions, various democratic institutions is that the room for the youth participation. So unfortunately once we use the certain terms we actually make the world too simplistic and this is something which also concerns me that once we talk about it there were also questions related to natural resources and crimes that actually these crimes are not necessarily recognized as crimes internationally and there is not resolutions how to how these crimes could be taking to for example international court. Thank you very much. I think these three questions addressed each of you in some way and then we have a short answer each and then we have the final round. Let's do the same order as before. Well for the first question it's not easy for a researcher to trace the impact of her or his work. So once your paper is out it's open for the public and basically many researchers believe that their role is stopped. Then you can advocate in a policy making community to read it and what are the advantages and so forth but that's not easy because it's up to the policy making community to let's say read your work or at least an abstract of it or a two page summary of it and then see if there's something useful for it. So once you see an evolution in large donors way they do policy it's also very difficult to say this is due because of my paper it doesn't work like that it's usually an evolution that has many papers together with John Francois on the importance of hosts who are accepting refugees in their community and I remember that the UNHCR about 20 years ago were only looking at refugees that was their main mandate what happens to the refugees do they have shelter do they have food and at the conference after that paper somebody told me well now we're also looking at the hosts and of course that's not the result of my paper but we really told the UNHCR that you shouldn't focus only on the refugees but also on the host community who might be envious that the refugees get access to jobs they get access to sanitary conditions they get access to health and the hosts in the same community don't get any access whereas they taking all the space there and the new policy of UNHCR since a few years is to integrate services for refugees who are forcibly displaced as well as the host population in those areas and we advocate it in that paper and so is that an outcome of one's work I don't know but it is like policy evolution goes that way and as researchers or as a community of researchers we contribute and we try to convince large donors to go in that direction and then they have influences from many directions and the researchers is one of those influences maybe if I can just sorry I didn't want to stop you but I had this question. I think just on that point sometimes I think it's just pushing a perspective rather than a finding I think that's maybe our more important contribution and getting people to think of a certain angle or certain view rather than saying what specifically needs to be done that's my view of how academic research can be very influential but you have a brief point on the second. Yes on the capacity building we had a few years ago we had a group of people who trained statisticians working on National Institute of Statistics in Sub-Saharan Africa in the Middle East and in Asia and this effort was led by Tillman where we were one week, three times one week with 20, 30 statisticians from one of each country where we trained them in how to include questions on exposure to violence in the work that they were already doing and I think remarkable that they were open to that because National Institute of Statistics usually not interested in questions on exposure to violence but we worked with them and they said it's possible to introduce that in the work they were doing and we did that for African scholars or statisticians people in the Middle East and in Asia and I think Tillman of course you know more about it but this was really great to be able to do that and for me it's for part of our time next of course to the graduate students we have but also to scholars in the global south Thank you Philip Maria Yes on the capacity of local researchers I would like to add something on the household conflict network I was a researcher based in Colombia and working at the Colombian University for the last years I haven't been but for me being able to present my work to the different workshops of Hickin and no people from other countries was very important because my job was showcased but also because I was able to establish networks and work on a lot of projects that we have been working together for example with Patricia and with other researchers so this allows us in a developing country to really strengthen our capacity in a more informal way that I think it's also very important about climate migration I agree fully with you it's a much more complex process in fact when you ask migrants why they migrated they would never say it's because of the climate it's because I was hungry it's because I lacked food or it's because there was crop failure however I do believe that we need to go into that discussion because climate is causing migration and it's causing a lot of negative impacts and it's going to affect developing and developed countries and it's going to have redistributional consequences and I think the discussion is important because how do we address that what is going to be the responsibility of developed countries what is going to be the responsibility of the developing countries how do the developed countries are going to receive support to that process so although I agree completely with you we need to have that discussion on the question of systemic change it's always tempting to say that whatever new and big happens is going to change everything in a sort of radical way I still remember how people predicted the pandemic was going to be completely game changing in everything it has been in some respects but not in others and it has been completely the opposite as well in some other respects and even for September 11 which I think in retrospect turns out to have been quite consequential it was consequential primarily through the channel of the US response to it rather than the attack itself and also in a sort of complicated way so it's impossible to say how what is happening now is going to change things some people for example quickly have jumped on the idea that we're going to go to a new cold war we don't know whether that's going to be the case one of the difficulties perhaps that's an example to illustrate the point is that when we do research the same concept is sometimes consistent with one thing and exactly it's opposite which makes this type of prediction very difficult I'll give you the example which is we think of nationalism as an ideology that is primarily associated with violent conflicts through aggressive wars through secessionist wars for example but it's also the case and we forget it and I think the events in Ukraine illustrated that nationalism has been also associated with the prevention of war the reason one of the factors that we've had a very important decline of interstate wars is the fact that you cannot really absorb a population into your country because they have a different national identity from you and it is the ignorance of that fact by Russia that has led in a sense of the war the idea that the Ukrainians wouldn't resist the way they haven't that is illustrating perhaps how these things work in ways that are difficult to predict and precise before the conflict began I believe that the Russians were not going to invade precisely because of that factor now the fact that they ignored it isn't necessarily a falsification of that but perhaps the outlier eventually that confirms that indeed nationalism has the property of preventing war as well so I'm not going to make any prediction about the long-term effects of what is happening it can go in any direction what I'm going to say is that people who make very strong predictions probably shouldn't be listened to Thank you, good policy advice Tony I'd just like to pick up on I think it was Illa's point from the University of Eastern Finland about a lot of crimes are not being prosecuted or not recognised as crimes and there's an interesting issue here now for example if you take the diamond trade we know that the diamonds are often flowing down from artisanal miners through complex systems of criminal networks and conflict networks so there's an analysis at the household level of the artisanal miners and how they're driven to that by poverty but there's also an issue around the industrial organisation of very complex supply chains with the move of the diamonds for example from the Sahel through to the Gulf countries where they're finally sold and so forth and that chain we have efforts to try and organise responsible chains in commodities the Kimberley process and so forth has made some dent in it but there's an interesting dynamic here and it now connects to the point we were just discussing earlier about bold predictions which is that what's to make a bold prediction in the case of Russia again if you take diamonds but also gold Russia is a very big producer probably about a third of the gold market a third of the diamond market overall the process by which now those diamonds and that gold are going to move international centres for sale and onward transmission it's attracting a lot of attention including possibly the use of secondary sanctions on merchants in the Gulf and so forth so whereas the artisanal mining conflict issue in Africa has not attracted enough policy attention the case law the actions that are taking the case of Russia on the sanctions of income from not only mining but oil and gas possibly will set up a set of case laws which can then be used in the prosecutions of people involved in other conflicts or other illegal criminal activity particularly in the African case so if I've got a prediction a bold prediction it would be that we might actually see progress from the current situation that we are with Ukraine and Russia but maybe I'm wrong Stasya thinks you're wrong because it's a bold prediction but let's have one of two last no, okay is that Anastasia behind the mask and then at the back two quick questions but please be brief each and then with a final round of answers and then we finish in a few minutes, thank you thank you very much for a great discussion Stasya Shestorina Centre for the Comparative Study of Civil War the University of Sheffield I have a very simple question what in your view are some of the most important questions that we should be asking going forward okay, thank you the UK's Foreign Commonwealth Development Office a question for Anna Maria I was interested in the finding you talked about on reduction in wages of our workers in recipient countries receiving migrants fleeing from conflict which conflicts is different from the finding of international migrants going to advanced economies where we see benign or even positive impacts not that you could get our politicians to admit it but could I attempt to speculate on what's driving that difference and if there's anything that policy makers could do to turn the conflict migration situation to look more in the future thank you very much and then one more behind you thank you, I'm Baby Karnisto from UNVMIN and I wanted to suggest two areas to further research especially based on Tony's comments in the panel and you mentioned Darfur also in this discussion so in Darfur and also in ISIS occupied areas of Iraq huge areas of land were cleared by armed groups especially by using sexual violence against women and girls and this land was cleared overtaken by the armed groups and there is evidence they were also used for financing the activities of these armed groups so like extremist activities afterwards so are we so focused on looking at refugees and humanitarian catastrophes ensuing that we are not looking at what is happening in the areas that are left behind by the refugees and then the other research area linked into this there are still from two of these areas which were mentioned there are at least a million refugees still displaced, over a million displaced people they are never going to get their land and assets back who is looking at what is the situation of people who used to own the land and assets and it was taken away overtaken by armed groups and they are not able to get their land back so I think that situation I haven't heard anyone addressing it anywhere really in a bigger scale thank you. Thank you very much. Just very briefly pick one question and answer it in 30 seconds Phillip. Well I'm going to look in my crystal ball no I don't have one. One question that has been on my mind is that how do you address fully is the relationship between the macro and the micro level and so we know policies are made at the macro level but how do they influence choices at the micro level and to give an example if for example as a researcher you believe inequality is very important and you find some evidence about that I challenge you to find out how do young people join a rebel group and making that that click making that link from the macro to the micro level is extremely difficult and I think that could be an interesting future agenda how do young people in conflict affected countries regard at the macro level and the policy makers and how are they feeling influenced in their own decision making and how do they influence choices and I think that's a challenging question we haven't fully tried a few times but we haven't fully addressed that and I would like to see more work on that Thank you Philip Thank you Tillman I'm going to answer the question about the reduction of wages with the internally displaced population I have two hypotheses but I really think that need to be really first one is the country is in conflict so labour markets in the whole country are weak and all the country is facing the economic impacts of conflict so you have people moving around the country and they arrive to urban areas but the urban areas anyways are not so dynamic to absorb the population and not have a reduction in wages so you see this very large reduction in wages and the second reason is because you have very large informal that are extremely sensitive and they can move they don't have this floor that is the minimum wage because these are unregulated markets so that's why wages fall so significantly and I think that's important another important thing that has not been studied is what happens in the areas where the displaced population came from where all these massive flows of people went out and that's something that must have happened with the labour markets there and I haven't seen any studies on that Thank you very much Maria I should take the question about the most important question that is not asked and I would say my favourite one is that if you think about how many countries are extremely poor how much inequality exists how much ethnic tension and antagonism how many corrupt politicians are around it's really puzzling that there is no more conflict happening around us and in fact the puzzle of peace is exactly that there is a lot of peace much more than one would expect based on the kinds of things we think are associated with conflict and if that's the case then it means that perhaps the conflict we see is just noise and the really important questions we should be asking are the questions about the resilience of human behaviour and institutions which despite all these things that are so challenging prevent conflict from happening actually Thank you status Antoni On the research issues I think as I said before the transnational networks of wealthy families and clans and how they not only operate through criminal syndicates but also engage in state capture and how they manage their wealth because I think that's terribly important for policy how are we going to get at the issue is it legal, is it the corruption acts, is it what are we going to do about that because we don't quite have the instruments but also actually just picking up on Paivi's point about the sexual violence and so forth we tend to confine some of these things into silos so some people are studying trafficked women for example prostitution and so forth some are studying narcotics some are studying diamonds and so forth but from the perspective of organised crime it's a portfolio and one thing can leverage you into another so if you have the artisanal diamond revenue you can then go into women to Europe you can engage in the narcotics or drugs trade you can steal as an asset collateral for further crime so I think you know because there are separate agencies working on these issues they can drop into silos where they're very much interconnected alright thank you Tony thank you Stathis, thank you Anna Maria thank you Philip and thank you for your questions and for staying on so long until 6pm and this brings us to the end of day one of this conference but it doesn't bring us I think to the end of micro level research on conflict and just listening to my colleagues here I'm realising that I'm probably just about half way through my you know sort of post-PhD professional career if I don't go into politics or policy and so I have another I don't know 16 to 18 years to go which would bring us comfortably to another UN wider conference on the theme in the year 2000 I don't know 40 or so and I would imagine that there are two things we would be discussing then A. I don't think peace will be done and conflict solved unfortunately I fear that it's something that will always bubble up to some extent but I could imagine that we'll have a lot more disciplines on the podium here generally working together across these traditional boundaries public health people, lawyers psychologists I don't know maybe engineers or natural scientists so I think that is one way to go and I think I'm very excited about that and I look forward in the next few years to work with people from completely different backgrounds I have a lot of very good economics colleagues but I really look forward to making colleagues in other fields and the other thing is I'm a sort of survey type of person I like measuring things and it strikes me that when we start measuring something we start studying it and I think we need to measure a lot more things in order to some of the things we discussed here with words we couldn't have discussed them with numbers and so I think we need to keep being on the alert what is it that we study with all this promise of big data and automated data and so on what is that measuring in turn and so just making sure that we really capture peace and conflict properly and comprehensively in the human response to it so I think unfortunately a lot remains to be done in business then and thank you for your patience and your attention thank you