BACKGROUND Warring groups that compete to dominate a civilian population confront contending behavioral options: target civilians or battle the enemy. We aimed to describe degrees to which combatant groups concentrated lethal behavior into intentionally targeting civilians as opposed to engaging in battle with opponents in contemporary armed conflict. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We identif...

This issue brief provides a brief overview of the legal, political, and operational frameworks protecting children from the effects of armed conflict, notably from violations by nonstate armed groups. It explores some of the limitations of these frameworks and their mechanisms, and then discusses ways to maximize the comparative advantages of different actors when engaging nonstate armed groups...

This paper examines the effect of conflict on agricultural production of small farmers. First, an inter-temporal model of agricultural production is developed in which the impact of conflict is transmitted through violent shocks and uncertainty brought about by conflict. We test the model using a unique household survey applied to 4,800 households in four micro-regions of Colombia. Our findings...

We simulate how a set of different UN policies for peacekeeping operations is likely to affect the global incidence of internal armed conflict. The simulation is based on a statistical model that estimates the efficacy of UN peacekeeping operations (PKOs) in preventing the onset, escalation, continuation, and recurrence of internal armed conflict. The model takes into account a set of important...

Cinema is an act of representation and it is based on the construction of reality inspired by experience. In Colombia, cinema has not been the product of a structured industry, but rather the effort of some filmmakers who have found different ways of telling stories about topics that are part of the national experience. The armed conflict in Colombia, understood as the confrontation between gov...

BACKGROUND Current conceptual frameworks on the interrelationship between armed conflict and poverty are based primarily on aggregated macro-level data and/or qualitative evidence and usually focus on adherents of warring factions. In contrast, there is a paucity of quantitative studies about the socioeconomic consequences of armed conflict at the micro-level, i.e., noncommitted local household...

BACKGROUND It is assumed that knowing what puts young women at risk of poor sexual health outcomes and, in turn, what protects them against these outcomes, will enable greater targeted protection as well as help in designing more effective programmes. Accordingly, efforts have been directed towards mapping risk and protective factors onto general ecological frameworks, but these currently do no...

This paper examines the effects of armed conflicts between drug gangs in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas on student achievement. We explore variation in violence that occurs across time and space when gangs battle over territories. Within-school estimates indicate that students from schools exposed to violence score less in math exams. Our findings suggest that the effect of violence increases with co...

This paper uses two unique panel data sets to study the causal effect that armed conflict has over entrepreneurial activity in Colombia. Using a fixed effect estimation methodology at the plant level and controlling for the possible endogeneity of armed conflict through the use of instrumental variables, we find that a one standard deviation in the number of guerrilla and paramilitary attacks i...