(Re)Emerging Disease and Conflict Risk in Africa, 2000 – 2018

Abstract

Abstract The frequency of new disease outbreaks may rise in coming decades due to deforestation and climate change, yet their impact on conflict is poorly understood. Leveraging a new geolocated monthly outbreak dataset on 23 zoonotic pathogens in Africa, this study explores the impact of (re)emergent disease on armed conflict. Zoonotic pathogens are considered key drivers of reemergent and new epidemic risk, making them a useful test case while also ensuring their probability of being reported by media and health policy outlets is high. Results suggest that over the January 2000 – Dec. 2018 period, zoonotic disease outbreaks intensified social conflict but had a dampening effect on state-initiated conflict. Social conflict intensification was due to civil defense mobilization rather than security outsourcing by the government. Rebel-initiated conflicts are not noticeably sensitive to outbreaks. Results are robust to system GMM models that account for endogeneity and a battery of additional robustness models.