The impacts of armed conflict on human development: A review of the literature

The detrimental impacts of wars on human development are well documented across research domains, from public health to micro-economics. However, these impacts are studied in compartmentalized silos, which limits a comprehensive understanding of the consequences of conflicts, hampering our ability to effectively sustain human development. This article takes a first step in addressing this gap by reviewing the literature on conflict impacts through the lens of an inter-disciplinary theoretical framework. We review the literature on the consequences of conflicts across 9 dimensions of human development: health, schooling, livelihood and income, growth and investments, political institutions, migration and displacement, socio-psychological wellbeing and capital, water access, and food security. The study focuses on both direct and indirect impacts of violence, reviews the existing evidence on how impacts on different dimensions of societal wellbeing and development may intertwine, and suggests plausible mechanisms to explain how these connections materialize. This exercise leads to the identification of critical research gaps and reveals that systematic empirical testing of how the impacts of war spread across sectors is severely lacking. By streamlining the literature on the impacts of war across multiple domains, this review represents a first step to build a common language that can overcome disciplinary silos and achieve a deeper understanding of how the effects of war reverberate across society. This multidisciplinary understanding of conflict impacts may eventually help to reconcile divergent estimates and enable forward-looking policies that minimize the costs of war. •Armed conflict has complex, multi-level impacts on many dimensions of human development.•Armed conflict affects development through destruction, deterioration, disruption, diversion, dissaving and devaluation.•Individual and macro-level impacts of armed conflict are both short and long-lasting, and extend beyond directly affected areas.•The expectation of violence is sufficient to negatively impact development across many domains.•Women and children are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of violence.•The impacts of violence across different domains are likely to interact and reinforce, but more research is needed to understand these indirect mechanisms.