HiCN Call for Papers “Social unrest and violent conflict in times of pandemics”

The 16th Annual 16th Annual Workshop of the Households in Conflict Network will be an online event this year, due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The world is experiencing an shock of massive proportions, with a host of unexplored questions and uncertain answers. Scholars can contribute substantially to the debate, in particular a network as ours with a long empirical research tradition.

We are inviting papers in any realm of the empirical, micro-level analysis of violent conflict. As every year, we have a special theme for the workshop. In particular, we are inviting empirical, micro-level papers that shed a light on the nexus between pandemics, social unrest and violent conflict. Most of the media attention has been on EU, US and China. While we welcome papers that focus on these countries, we especially want to hear from scholars who have investigated the impact of Covid-19 in countries and contexts that have received less attention to date. We are also interested in receiving papers that propose innovative methodological approaches to fieldwork amidst the Covid-19 pandemic (e.g. telephone interviews, use of administrative and big data, online survey methods and so forth) and new theoretical and empirical perspectives on the impact of Covid-19 on people, households, groups and firms, such as the welfare and economic impact of lockdowns, effects of the pandemic and lockdowns on the labour market, consequences of the pandemic in humanitarian settings and among refugees and displaced populations, consequences for supply chains and food markets, effects on schooling, children and mental health, (dis)trust in government, among others. Historical analyses of previous pandemics are also very welcome.

As in previous years, we also welcome creative and innovative papers on the analysis of violent conflict that do not deal directly with the annual theme.

Keynote speakers this year are Melissa Dell, Professor of Economics at Harvard University and Dr. Arif Husain, Chief Economist and Director of the Food Security Analysis and Trends Service at United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in Rome, Italy.

At this stage we are inviting papers and extended abstracts to be submitted by July 15, 2020 to annualworkshop.hicn2020@gmail.com. Authors will be informed about the final paper selection by August 1, 2020. Due to the exceptional circumstances we are living at the moment, we will accept extended abstracts this year. Authors submitting extended abstracts will need to submit full papers for final consideration by October 1, 2020.

The workshop will take place on November 10 (World Science Day for Peace and Development) and November 11 (Armistice Day). We expect to accommodate around 15 papers for online presentations each day, some of which will be presented in parallel sessions. We will also allow co- authors and a limited number of interested non-presenters to participate in the online event.

The HiCN co-directors: Tilman Brück, Patricia Justino and Philip Verwimp.