 Yes, thank you very much Omar and thank you to WIDA for bringing us together for a conflict session as Patricia said There was a conference here at WIDA just on conflict about 11 years ago and that Conference had a 100 presentations on all aspects of the economics of conflict that you can imagine 96 of those presentations dealt with Ghassiana style sort of more macro big-picture stories and they were fascinating presentations But only four of the hundred presentations dealt with Patricia style micro type things And that's the point where Patricia Philip and I decided we should do more of that and on today's panel You know, it's sort of slightly more evenly balanced. So, you know, that says something about the discipline I think it says something about Different perspectives on the economics of conflict have have come through and if we look back and reflect on what WIDA has Contributed, I think it has contributed a lot to making the economics of conflict a mainstream topic And I think it's great that we have a whole session here at the anniversary conference Earlier this morning we heard Justin Lin say that it's not state versus markets. It's actually state and markets I think this session we need to look at the state beyond a facilitator of export and Productivity growth and providing infrastructure For manufacturing the way he was thinking about it I think here we looked in a much more nuanced way at a state But also at wider institutions at no pun intended at the social institutions informal institutions Which can constrain human behavior the way Oma pointed out in my view irrespective of our motivation whether we are greedy or whether we are Grieving and I think we need to so whether we are good or whether we're bad people I think we need to work in an environment and live in an environment where we have Formal and informal institutions which constrain our our behavior in a way that we can interact peacefully and free of violence And I think that's why actually also the literature has moved a little bit from just looking at Incidences of mass violence and sort of the most brutal Examples of what humans can do to one another to much more subtle forms like Patricia pointed out and Including the economics of fragility Understanding as sort of you know how institutions can degenerate and how that affects our behavior and our well-being So I think that's that's one of the sort of more promising issues Well, we haven't made as much progress perhaps as in the outright Big violent conflict has massive consequences for for example human development for education for health for food security Etc. So I think that's now a stylized fact, but it's less of a stylized fact still how Fragilities is underpinned. What are the micro level analysis of of fragility and how do individuals interact with institutions? And I think was very helpful that Patricia pointed out some of the things that we could work on I just want to comment very briefly on each of the presentations and raise some of the thoughts that that came to my mind in Part just echoing what what had been said. So in Graciana's presentation, I liked very much that you emphasize the limited ability of Donors or Western countries or powers or whatever you want to call them to actually Change things for the good whatever that may be from their perspective So and billions and billions are being spent on fighting a war in Afghanistan. For example, has it done much good? We are not sure has it done some bad. Yes, definitely Has it actually changed the underlying sort of social fabric or the traditional and you know the informal institutions? No, probably not so You know what we notice is that there are policy makers in Western capitals who are very preoccupied with a very limited set of policy Objectives and who forget about a lot of other things they could probably do much more usefully So the opportunity cost of policies not undertaken is perhaps one of the largest cost of conflict beyond the numeric cost The economic cost of conflict that which Graciana has worked on which I've also worked on which which actually is substantial So you can see some data and I've done some calculations that the the economic cost of conflict Is actually akin to the cost of climate change for the world economy? So there is a good reason to look at violence and to look at conflict But I think the the sort of the implicit cost in the cost in terms of good policies for gone is perhaps even more Significant and I think there's also a more sort of subtle issue if we think about Or let me put it like this. Graciana. You said you worked in the office of butto's garlic in order to think about you know How to configure these things and these interventions and and what to do and and that presumably has you know Got you interested in these issues and motivated you to keep working on that But I fear that for one Graciana who has struggled with these issues Back then and that office and they're probably a hundred if not more eight agency project officers who worked in some bunker somewhere in Kabul and experienced sort of Assistance failing under these difficult circumstances and were traumatized by these Failed attempts at doing something and who are going back to their capital to going back to their countries who are shaping the public discourse Who are shaping the way and we understand what development assistance and what economic Corporation and what even security interventions can do for better or for worse So I I feel that there's a sort of a generation of technocrats in the sense burned by the wrong policy engagement Rather than having experienced what what good can be done in other circumstances with a more nuanced approach and more subtle approach And I think one of the things that I I fear is missing is Sort of the idea of time consistency So the big picture so the sort of thing we encourage to do here to to look back to look forward Policy is very much short-term very much driven by the very few topics that the senior policymakers and the media can engage with And if we if we were more time consistent in our behavior if in a way we outsource some of the Political decision-making and security decision-making the way we do it in monetary policy for example Yeah, monetary policy is far too important to leave it to the politicians I mean imagine the Chancellor of the Exchequer still setting interest rates in Britain today that would be very scary thought Yeah, no, we leave that to the technocrats and actually, you know, it's a good we do but other very important decisions We leave to the politicians why it's a very scary thought Yeah, so we we may want to think about how can we get more time consistency in these life-and-death decision-making processes So it's not driven by the short-term media circuit And I think for that we need to think much more about the security development nexus and the interdependencies And I like that very much as you emphasize the the importance of that and the different communities And we need to bring these different communities together Maybe this is not the best place to and to talk to the security community Although breakfast there was a three-star finish general having breakfast there But maybe should have sat at his table instead of talking to Patricia. Yeah, but and ask him what he was doing Patricia emphasized the the focus in the research from the shift from the state To the to the micro level, but I think and I don't think she would disagree I don't think so much a shift from the state to focusing on the micro level I think to some extent it's a focus of the state and the micro level and the engagement of individuals and households and entrepreneurs and Groups with the state and other relevant Institutions and trying to track that at the at those levels also in the data. We have a data revolution We get a lot more data We can do a lot more empirical analysis these days But there's still a lot to do and tracking individuals in violent situations and conflict situations And it's a very important thing to do so we don't just generalize we don't say well in Uganda It's like this and in Ghana. It's like that so we can say you know this this farmer He experienced a conflict like that and his next door neighbor experienced the conflict very differently Or maybe even the the farmer and and his wife or their children experienced each individually a conflict very differently And this is something that we're trying to do in our our joint work Patricia and I We're trying to change household surveys or just household surveys so we can track conflict through the surveys And we've developed a module which can do that in a statistical way So that is something that I think will provide us even more evidence even more analysis and can help Informed and also policy making it's a very slow process is a very painstaking process to generate this evidence And I don't think there any any quick wins. Let's let's think back about the post World War two period people You know, we're maybe debating about agricultural the green revolution or maybe they were thinking about education You know, should you send girls to education on nowadays? We know of course You should send boys and girls very few people left to advocate otherwise. So that's a stylized fact But how do you overcome conflict? How do you do reconstruction? We have very few stylized facts in that field And I think it will take another whatever 30 years or so of wider research until we we have genuine real stylized fact in that field Finally Mansoop, I maybe have one minute left Two thoughts and one is you talked about vertical inequality in my research I found that vertical inequality doesn't actually cause conflict. So that's the good news But the bad news is that the legacies of conflict even after the war ends and this relates now back also to Graciana It's the reconstruction that often causes the inequality because who benefits from the reconstruction the first instance It's not the poorest people. It's the richer people in the conflict affected countries Who managed to get going who managed to exploit opportunities and who managed to enrich themselves further and Absolutely and relative to the poorest people. So I think we have to be very careful about inequality Not just because of the conflict, but also because of the reconstruction and my final thought on behavior and Conflict of course also shapes behavior and it does so in a very long-term way It does so many years after the end of the conflict after the end of the conflict It does so perhaps even intergenerationally I have an ongoing project in Angola where we see that soldiers were massively traumatized in the fighting and in the war Years many years after the end of the war after they've been demobilized have very very high levels of domestic violence To their own partners in their own families as a result of having been traumatized by the conflict and we know that fathers Beating and raping their wives transmits to their children to their sons as well Their sons are more likely to in turn beat and rape their wife So that's a very scary thought that these conflict legacies can can last intergenerationally even after the guns have fallen silent and final thought and outside of the presentations and Earlier we heard that the north must maybe also learn from the south and I think that's a very interesting thought for our field as well conflict thinking of the refugees coming to Europe and the escaping Syria and other countries in northern Africa in the Middle East I think we need to diverse to fix perspectives and experiences And I think a lot of European policymaking could perhaps also learn from development economics in that respect. Thank you very much Thank you very much stillman for providing us with some very constructive and Making the effort to try to synthesize not only thoughts in these presentations But thoughts from some of the presentations in the plenary session. We have time now for questions I think we've got we've got 20 minutes before lunch begins So it's now an opportunity for you members of the audience to ask questions to our panelists When you do so if you would kindly first just introduce yourselves and let us know your name and your affiliation and Also, just to remind you what a question is it is a short statement that ends in a question mark That would be much appreciated. We have Roving mics. So if you would raise your hand, I will identify you and our Mike master will hand you the mic Gentleman here on the left Thank you very much. This is yes. I was fascinated with this Suggestion that perhaps conflict of the Mr. Brook. Yes that We needed somehow to put Resolution of conflict in the hands of technocrats rather than politicians and I wondered whether you considered This is the question whether the UN with all its experience of conflict actually provides often that sort of professional recommendation question one and question two related to it and when governments as politicians then refuse to take the suggestions as in Syria or whatever What does that show about the limits of technical advice? Good. Thank you. Could you just quickly say what your name and affiliation? I'm Richard jolly of ideas like Patricia Tillman Thank you. I'll also try to be short. Is this working? Yeah, and on the first point I think the problem the challenge with the UN at the moment is that it's Mandated ad hoc by politicians to find solutions where they fail to do so and that is not the same as having permanently surrendered certain decision-making power from ad hoc decision-making to a more rules-based System which I think the UN could well provide, but it's not the way it's designed at the moment. Yeah, so we and with the Security Council vetoes etc. You know it remains a Driven by ad hoc decision-making so you can appoint a special envoy to Syria and ask him to mediate But it won't work as long as everybody still has a hand over the button and gets to decide You know whether or not they want to accept the outcome and on the second Sorry the second question. Can you just say one sentence and recap it well that you've answered it by okay politicians retain Yeah, the Specialized agencies of the UN the specialized agencies of the UN Often are active because they're in the countries anyway Without it being put so obviously back to the politicians let alone do a security council So perhaps you and peacekeeping missions if well funded and with a robust mandate Then operate below the radar of the international news media long after the ceasefire has been signed and the peace agreement has been signed And that can be an example of better Although of course you can still have individual nation states interfering and saying sorry You know this goes too far now We can't have any more of this but but I think maybe there are examples where you can see how it works better and Compared to say Syria, you know where it doesn't work or Iran or Afghanistan or Iraq, etc. Yeah, great. Thank you very much more questions All right, I see a gentleman here on the left and I see in the far right So starting here with this gentleman on the left hand side Fascinating talks. Thank you so much. I'm precursor sing from Amherst College, Massachusetts so my question is for Tillman because he mentioned that There's a paper that he's working on which finds the increase in domestic violence of of civil war So what is the present state of the literature? Looking at the effect of conflict on intra household outcomes and What do you see as the future in this subfield of conflict? Thank you Maybe I also take the second question as well if the mic could be passed that way Yes to Miguel Thanks, Omar. I'm beginning your unit water. So my question is to the panel You talk about conflict but seems to me that it wasn't clear whether you were talking about war or between Countries so across borders or conflict between borders within societies No, so I suspect that going back to the point that Mansour was talking about like If you think about till its renal theory, you know the war in a way enhanced institutional building in European countries and then you see conflict or countries experiencing internal conflict perhaps incentives for Institutional building of different kinds So I'm also thinking about the category inequalities that the Germans were referring to at the time I would say inconsistencies that we observe and young among young people in for example in Africa Countries which which have experienced conflict. So I suspect that the theory will predict different outcomes So so my question is so what kind of tools or analytical tools you may Use to predict how to resolve the issues of conflict Thank you. Maybe we start with you mensubes and still when you've just spoken Yeah, thank you for the question. I mean the definition of conflict over here first of all, it should be clear We mentioned we're talking about internal conflict. Okay, then we have a gray area As to whether we only consider civil war or we consider other forms of conflict among them are sectarian conflict where the state is not a target. So, you know, I can Indonesia they can be Christian Muslim violence where the state is not a target and Should we include that sort of? type of conflict in the types of analysis that we are thinking of and In addition to that you have routine violence, which is essentially brawls bad behavior And they had data sets on that in different parts of the world, but essentially we are talking about civil wars insurgencies Which are rebellions? And mass protests the the empirical definition is in terms of tends to be in terms of fatalities and Tends to be in terms of a threshold Where? 25 people have been killed and let's not go into the details of how this data is collected with this there Between Uppsala University and Priya in Oslo. There's this ucdp data Set there so that's that's The answer to the question as far as conflict is definition of conflict is concerned and My other comment would be both to Tillman and to you is that you know measured inequality Whether that's what I think we have to move away from this dry concept of vertical and horizontal inequality partially because I'm I've heard so much of it for the last 16 years that I am absolutely ready to you know, disgorge it literally at the moment but Also because Vertical inequality has a horizontal inequality Component in it. In other words, there's a categorical inequality component in it in another room We have someone called Chico Ferrera who's done work on Decomposing inequality of opportunity from measured inequality. Okay, so the next challenge is we have let's say we have three types of inequality one is because of unequal life chances one because of your identity and One because of your effort and there are other random elephant elements like larkin and so on Okay, so we have to decompose all these four components from any measured Inequality metric and therefore vertical and horizontal inequality is you know as The experimental economists say about you know observe data dead. Okay, so That's what we need to do and there there's a lot of work going on at the moment which looks at Some form of categorical inequality only based upon a crude measure rather than a genie and look at If you like a conflict variable as a dependent variable So what is the inequality measure usually political exclusion of a group? Then there is some sort of income inequality and that's based upon very shoddy you know Geo-coded data for 1995 which is totally utterly and unreliable and Therefore the economic dimension is not really mentioned as I was saying in the last sentence of my talk Sorry, I've gone on and rambled but perhaps I've answered your question. That's great. Thank you Mansoob. I know the second the first question was directed at you Tillman But before I give you the opportunity to grass Yana or Patricia. I want to say anything About the first question. If not, that's that's fine Yes I'll just add a small thing because actually applies to some of the limitations of the the work Done in terms of data collection. Yes We are referring to internal wars just because statistically they they are much more prominent than Inter-country wars at the moment, but one of the limitations is that data is collected within borders of Countries, so what we're not very good at and and it's a challenge for the future is how do you deal with? Processes that spill across borders data collection by definition is done by statistical agencies within the borders of a country How do you deal then with issues around sort of cross ethnic? Divisions and so forth that are within across the borders now We don't have answers which might explain why we still don't see much results in terms of does inequality affect conflict Well, maybe yes, but we actually are missing all this dimension and so far not a great deal has been done Wait, thank you Tillman. Did you want to respond to that other question? Yeah, and so I just want to differentiate that two types of issues one is that I said that Conflict affects every individual differently it affects men different from women and you know by ethnicity by location etc So within one family, you know each household member might experience conflict differently That's sort of conflict as an exogenous thing But secondly second whole issue is that within the family or household there could be interdependencies and you know effects from one to the other so for example from the demobilized soldier and Say to his wife if there's domestic violence, yeah, and then that might be transmitted and now the nightmare from an economic analysis point of view of causes, you know teasing that all out and you know getting a clear Identification and so on so so I think that's very tricky and having said that I think some of the Hypothesis are quite intuitive. Yeah, that they are Significant effects even with even the second dimension within the household, but I think the challenge for empirical researchers to to be accurate and to spell it out and to demonstrate it so that We know how important it is also relatively speaking to other things and then it can be put into the Programming hopefully one day into policymaking so that we know, you know, what then helps against that So what do you then do to to you know, if you think from a policy perspective, how do you stop the demobilized soldiers from? In this case raping their wives or beating them Yeah, so what is it that you do is it about identity, you know, because they've lost their guns So, you know, they're nobody anymore. Yeah, their own self-image. Is it about activity? You know that they need higher paying jobs. Is it about, you know, other things? And so I think that that's a very that's the very difficult question to answer and there We perhaps need to move to different ways of learning about what works and what doesn't work So for example impact evaluations in these settings, you know other ways of Tackling the learning issue and I think I'll probably take another, you know 10 or 20 or 30 years before we have a very large and robust body of evidence Consisting of perhaps hundreds of different micro studies which answer that so I think very early days for this Conflict has effect on households and within household literature. It's very early days, I think Great, thank you We have a question in the front row here. Oh, sorry Apologize go ahead First I will I was going to propose that the UN you wider focus on the economics of peace rather than the economics of conflict But I see that most of you are more interested in in conflict So I'm going to forget about that proposal in the case of the 21 Operations that I discussed earlier in which the UN has had a major multidisciplinary peacekeeping operation or peace-building operation And that some of those operations have been US led They are all conflicts that are internal but with serious Regional implications. So we have Afghanistan. We have Iraq. We have the DRC and so forth and and that is why I Mentioned this multi-prong transition to peace because these countries are really coming out of situations in which the international community have pushed them to embark in these political security social and economic Transformation and the social transformation is how to deal with the polarization the internal polarization and You know of different kinds and how these people are going back to the same Villages and how they can live together and how they can address future conflict in a peaceful way But that is why it has been so difficult because This very large number of people that it's not only norm a former combatants and so forth But there are refugees huge numbers of displaced populations and so forth They have to be reintegrated and one of the major failures of the international community is that it has Managed to get temporary jobs for these people for instance, you know Cleaning the the Kabul River and things like that But these are temporary jobs and and after a while The those jobs don't exist anymore and these people are unemployed and willing to go back to arms So this has been a major challenge and that is why it's so difficult and and I don't Feel you can compare that type of conflict with conflict Which is common crime because they really it's very difficult and I think the the World Bank has done a disservice in their Publication by mixing common crime with these operations that are political in nature and The policy solutions are so different and the final point. I want to make on this Is that it's also different the the operations? I'm talking about They are countries that that's why they are called sometimes they're called state-building operations and It's very different for instance. I was invited by the by the Private sector association in Columbia recently to talk about what happens after they sign the peace agreement And how that's going to affect the the private sector and you know something that Tillman say before I'm convinced That unless you make some a Differences, you know with development economies with we we think of the equity principle where you should treat everybody the same policymaking in these situations as I was talking about earlier is Breaking some of the best practices in development. I mean you have to first of all Development economies and policy makers usually plan with the medium and term and long term in mind But you don't have that luxury in countries coming out of war. Sometimes you have to To adopt policies that you know, they are going to be Distortionary in the medium medium and long term, but you need to do it because Humanitarian reasons or other reasons so and the same with the equity principle in these operations You have to apply what has been called the peace building a Principle instead of the equity you have to make temporary a Exceptions for groups that you know unless you improve their Situation somehow they're going to go back to arms and if they go back to arms everybody's going to be worse off So you have to make temporary and that's why I made the distinction between the economics of peace and economic Reconstruction with normal development in that's why in this Transition phase you have to make these things that you know adopt best practices for the moment that Break many of the best practices and the normal development Great, thank you very much. We're reaching nearly the end of our time But there was one question last in the front row here So we'll we'll give going for people if we'll indulge us we'll just go for a few minutes and I'll take that final question lady in the front row George Institute of Technology and my question is Kind of related also to what the last comments of Graciella and what Patricia said and that's on You know we saw the rise in the literature on Mexican drug cartels and this is something like there is a gray area between the common crime type of thing and Like this violence becomes like so important and so like penetrating all Parts of a civilian life So the question is what type of need this organization is trying to feed fill in and How it's different from pure economic crime and how the responses should be targeted because the government has Tried to reposition this organization as a terrorist organization while it doesn't feed the profile Great. Thank you very much. If I could ask our panelists to respond briefly to it. Patricia. Did you want to say anything? Yes, that's exactly one of the examples where our The kind of the literally the concepts of conflict get a bit blurred and there's a lot to learn from different literatures Actually status Calivas is a great article in the Journal of conflict resolution where he talks about how you can Sort of what we've learned now about civil wars get we apply to the situation of the drugs Lords in in Mexico and there are a lot of things though a few things that we can learn one of the most fundamental Is what I was referring to about this idea of order meaning these groups are coming in into pretty stateless areas in In urban this this case happens to be an urban areas civil wars happen in mostly in rural areas But the common fact that there is stateless and weak weak institutions which are occupied by certain groups and And the parallels with groups like Hezbollah and Hamas and the Taliban are pretty striking So that's one of the areas that is quite fruitful to think about these issues. These guys are not just criminals They actually providing a function a social function sometimes which becomes really really tricky to deal with But I'll stop there. I mean, I think that's that's one of the most striking parallels between civil wars and this kind of blurred Criminology that that's quite important and I Was involved in the Fabellas in Brazil and trying to put together some kind of reconstruction for for this A problem in Brazil and the big difference is that you know countries like Mexico and Brazil they have very strong Governments, they have very strong Institutions in most of the countries that I have been talking today, you know, you don't have that you have very weak governments usually installed by the international community and They they have to do everything at the same time. They have to build institutions. They have to build economy rebuild reactivate growth and so forth. So so the the governments in in Mexico and in Brazil, they have much, you know, they have all the resources They should be able to fight these things in an easier way than so far They have proved to do and in fact Brazil has done some some progress, but not so much Mexico Thank you very much. Well, it just remains for me really to thank each of our panelists as well as yourselves for asking such great questions I think we've received some very interesting ideas thought-provoking Suggestions for how we might approach the issue of conflict non-development differently in the future Lunch awaits us. I'm fond of quotations. So I'd like to finish just on one that I liked It's by Bob McNamara, Secretary of Defense during this Vietnam War and he made a documentary in 2003 The fog of war he gave us 11 lessons about war and the first two are they stuck with me The first is empathize with your enemy The second is rationality won't save us. Okay on that note I end it and enjoy your lunch and I look forward to seeing some of you in the next sessions