The effect of violent conflict on household resilience and food security: Evidence from the 2014 Gaza conflict
This paper (PDF), in the World Development journal, studies how conflict affects household resilience capacity and food security, drawing on panel data collected from households in Palestine before and after the 2014 Gaza conflict. Food security of households in the Gaza Strip was not directly affected by the conflict. However, household resilience capacity that is necessary to resist food insecurity declined among Gazan households as a result of conflict. This was mainly due to a reduction of adaptive capacity, driven by the deterioration of income stability and income diversification. However, the conflict actually increased the use of social safety nets and access to basic services for the households exposed to the conflict. This may be due to the aid support provided to households by organizations after the end of the conflict. These results highlight the importance of health and social sectors for development in a conflict-affected economy. It also indicates the importance of labor markets in achieving sound household resilience capacity. Negative of restrictive labor markets can be compounded further during conflict. Further, is also emphasizes the importance of humanitarian response to conflict. From a policy perspective, the reduction of adaptive capacity which ultimately translates into a contraction of household resilience can be restored with immediate and significant support to victims of conflict. From a research perspective, the ways in which resilience capacity is recovered in the long-term, still needs studying as well as the impact of lower conflict on resilience capacity. Most importantly, it is needed to understand if either low or high intensity conflict may force households below a lower critical threshold of resilience capacity, from which households cannot recover without external assistance.