The United States Department of Defense’s Minerva Initiative has awarded the University of Maryland a grant for the project “Aiding Resilience? The Impact of Foreign Assistance on the Dynamics of Intrastate Armed Conflict”. The project is based at the Center for International Development and Conflict Management.
Does development aid affect resilience to intrastate armed conflict—and if so, where, when, and why? The aim of this project is to evaluate the association between types, locations, timing, and amounts of development aid and the likelihood, escalation, severity, spread, duration, and recurrence of violence, spanning the phases before, during, and after conflict.
The research design combines cross-national, subnational, and micro-level empirical analysis. The results will be integrated into simulations using computational modelling, to further probe aid-conflict dynamics and “what-if” counterfactuals. Expected products include a range of publications, as well as an interactive online tool that provides public access to explore extensive geo-referenced data on aid and conflict and to study and visualise their relationship.
The Principle Investigators (PIs) are:
- Paul Huth (Professor of Government; Director, Center for International Development and Conflict Management)
- David Backer (Assistant Director, Center for International Development and Conflict Management)
- Kevin Jones (Research Scholar, Center for International Security Studies at Maryland).
Partners include:
- The Center for International Security Studies at Maryland
- The College of William & Mary (specifically AidData; sub-award PIs: Brad Parks and Mike Tierney)
- The Institute of Development Studies (sub-award PI: Patricia Justino)
- The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (sub-award PI: Ravi Bhavnani)
- Development Gateway (sub-award PI: Nancy McGuire Choi).
Key contacts
