Henrik Urdal

• PhD, Political Science
• Professor at Peace Research Institute Oslo

Motivation Despite an increased focus on inclusive development, we know little about the extent to which development aid reaches politically excluded groups or how this varies across different donors. Purpose Addressing this knowledge gap, we develop and test a framework arguing that (i) areas where politically excluded groups live are less likely...

The world’s population is increasingly concentrated in cities. Research on urbanization’s implications for peace and security has been hampered by a lack of comparable data on political mobilization and violence at the city level across space and through time, however. Urban Social Disorder 3.0 is a detailed event dataset covering 186 national capi...

Globale helsespørsmål har mange berøringspunkter med internasjonal fred og sikkerhet, men har blitt viet relativt lite oppmerksomhet i diskusjoner i FNs sikkerhetsråd. Denne artikkelen gir en oversikt over kunnskapsgrunnlaget for sammenhengen mellom helse og internasjonal fred og sikkerhet, og belyser fire hovedgrupper av årsakssammenhenger. For de...

Armed conflicts are a concern for human development and public health and represent a major impediment for realizing Sustainable Development Goal #3: to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages. Vaccination programs can be highly politicized and subjected to major security constraints in war zones, reducing their effectivenes...

Elections generate incentives for contention and violence. However, collective action problems mute responses to strategic incentives by unorganized individuals, relative to organized groups. Variation in the severity of collective action problems and the degree of strategic behaviour results in distinct patterns of mobilization across these two ty...

Most research on the security implications of environmental and demographic change does not explicitly distinguish between urban and rural areas. While statistical conflict analyses are increasingly sophisticated with respect to spatial and substantive disaggregation they largely ignore the possibility that urban and rural areas may be affected dif...

The escalation of conflict in the Middle East coincides with an emerging trend of attacks on healthcare. Protection of health personnel, health services and humanitarian workers is no longer respected. This compromises the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 3 – towards health for all, and 16 – towards justice and peace....

Does more education lead to less political violence, and may education thus be a tool for peace? This article provides the first systematic review of the existing quantitative literature on education and political violence. Looking at arguments pertaining to levels, expansion, inequality, and content of education, we identify 42 quantitative studie...

Investigation of whether, how, and why inequality influences the dynamics of violent conflict has a long intellectual history. Inequality between individuals and households (vertical inequality) has dominated the literature, but recently attention has shifted to the role of group-based inequalities in triggering violence. Our review of research on...

This is a protocol for a Cochrane Review (Intervention). The objectives are as follows: To identify, synthesise and evaluate the effects of health system and other interventions aimed at improving maternal, newborn and women's reproductive health in crisis settings.

The conditions under which a mother gives birth greatly affect the health risk of both the mother and the child. This article addresses how local exposure to organized violence affects whether women give birth in a health facility. We combine geocoded data on violent events from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program with georeferenced survey data on th...

While there is a vast literature studying the effects of official development aid (ODA) on economic growth, there are far fewer comparative studies addressing how aid affects health outcomes. Furthermore, while much attention has been paid to country-level effects of aid, there is a clear knowledge gap in the literature when it comes to systematic...

Objectives Many conflict-affected countries are faced with an acute shortage of health care providers, including skilled birth attendants. As such, during conflicts traditional birth attendants have become the first point of call for many pregnant women, assisting them during pregnancy, labour and birth, and in the postpartum period. This study see...

A strong fertility decline in sub-Saharan Africaf could pave the way for a demographic transition on the continent that would open a demographic window of opportunity. However, it has been suggested that the demographic transition and increasing relative youth proportions are neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’ in themselves, and that under unfavorable politi...

Public health emergencies like major epidemics in countries with already poor health infrastructure have the potential to set back efforts to reduce maternal deaths globally. The 2014 Ebola crisis in Liberia is claimed to have caused major disruptions to a health system not fully recovered after the country’s civil war, and is an important and rele...

Study/Objective To identify, synthesize and evaluate the effects of a health system and other interventions aimed at improving Maternal, Newborn and Women’s Reproductive Health (MNWRH) in crisis settings. Background Maternal, newborn and reproductive health is a major problem in humanitarian/crisis settings mainly due to disrupted health service d...

Journal of Peace Research is an independent, interdisciplinary, and international journal devoted to the study of war and peace. It is owned by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and published on contract with Sage. Its articles range across all the social sciences, although a large majority of its authors now have their main training in poli...

Despite global efforts to expand educational opportunities for women, gender inequalities persist in many developing countries. Addressing the root causes of gender inequalities in secondary education we ask whether such disparities persist because of low state capacity or low willingness . Based on gender- and age-specific educational attainment d...

Objectives: Maternal and neonatal mortality and morbidity rates are particularly grim in conflict, post-conflict and other crisis settings, a situation partly blamed on non-availability and/or poor quality of emergency obstetric and neonatal care (EmONC) services. The aim of this study was to explore the barriers to effective delivery of EmONC ser...

This is the protocol for a review and there is no abstract. The objectives are as follows: To identify, synthesise and evaluate the effects of health system and other interventions aimed at improving maternal, newborn and women's reproductive health in crisis settings.

Armed conflict potentially poses serious challenges to access and quality of maternal and reproductive health (MRH) services, resulting in increased maternal morbidity and mortality. The effects of armed conflict may vary from one setting to another, including the mechanisms/channels through which the conflict may lead to poor access to and quality...

Background Armed conflict has been described as an important contributor to the social determinants of health and a driver of health inequity, including maternal health. These conflicts may severely reduce access to maternal health services and, as a consequence, lead to poor maternal health outcomes for a period extending beyond the conflict itsel...

A recent Climatic Change review article reports a remarkable convergence of scientific evidence for a link between climatic events and violent intergroup conflict, thus departing markedly from other contemporary assessments of the empirical literature. This commentary revisits the review in order to understand the discrepancy. We believe the origin...

Can states reduce the risk of violent political conflict by simply refusing to collect or publish data on their ethnic makeup and change? This study addresses a neglected aspect of the ethnic conflict literature and provides the first systematic empirical study of the significance of recording ethnic affiliation in censuses for the risk of armed co...

Established in 1964, the Journal of Peace Research (JPR) celebrates 50 years. This anniversary special issue of the journal offers broad reviews of research areas that have been central both to the journal and to the field of peace and conflict research generally. An opening article co-authored by long-time editor Nils Petter Gleditsch offers a his...

Recent studies have found significant excess mortality in women during and immediately after armed conflicts. This article directly assesses one of the most likely explanations, namely that war negatively affects reproductive health. Armed conflicts may contribute to sustain high fertility levels through increased social insecurity, loss of reprodu...

Hegre, Håvard et al. (2012) Predicting Armed Conflict, 2010–2050. International Studies Quarterly, doi: 10.1111/isqu.12007 © 2012 International Studies Association The article predicts changes in global and regional incidences of armed conflict for the 2010–2050 period. The predictions are based on a dynamic multinomial logit model estimation on a...

For the first time in history, the majority of the world population now lives in cities. Global urbanization will continue at high speed; the world's urban population is projected to increase by more than 3 billion people between 2010 and 2050. Some of this increase will be the result of high urban fertility rates and reclassification of rural land...

By 2050, two thirds of the world's population will live in cities, and the greatest growth in urban populations will take place in the least developed countries. This presents many governments with considerable challenges related to urban governance and the provision of services and opportunities to a burgeoning urban population. In the current art...

All parts of a country are rarely equally affected by political violence. Yet statistical studies largely fail to address sub-national conflict dynamics. We address this gap studying variations in 'routine' and 'episodic' violence between Indonesian provinces from 1990 to 2003. Within a grievance framework, the article focuses on the violence poten...

Demographic and environmental pressures have featured prominently in the debate over the new security challenges in the aftermath of the Cold War. The attention has primarily been on two arguably distinctive sets of population-conflict dynamics; the effect of population growth on dwindling resources, and the importance of age structure transition,...

The Lewis Fry Richardson Lifetime Achievement Award is a triennial prize to honour scholars, who have made exemplary contributions to the scientific study of militarised conflict. This essay presents the third winner of the award – Nils Petter Gleditsch – and commemorates on his scholarly achievements over the last four decades.

By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities, and the greatest growth in urban populations will take place in the least developed countries. This presents many governments with considerable challenges related to urban governance and the provision of services and opportunities to a burgeoning urban population. Among the concerns...

Much of the developing world has experienced a decline in mortality, while fertility often has remained high. This has produced youthful populations in many countries, generally referred to as"youth bulges."Recent empirical research suggests that youth bulges may be associated with increased risks of political violence and conflict. This paper addr...

Recent cross-national studies have found only moderate support for the idea that population pressure and resource scarcity may lead to political violence, contrary to much of the case study literature in the field. This article suggests that the level of analysis may be at the heart of this discrepancy. In a time-series study of political violence...

PRIO) Hausmanns gate 7 01862 Oslo Norway henriku@prio.no www.prio.no 3 A. INTRODUCTION Demographic and environmental pressures have featured prominently in the debate over the new security challenges in the aftermath of the Cold War. In the resource scarcity literature, high population growth and density are seen as major causes of scarcity of rene...

Climate change is expected to bring about major change in freshwater availability, the productive capacity of soils, and in patterns of human settlement. However, considerable uncertainties exist with regard to the extent and geographical distribution of these changes. Predicting scenarios for how climate-related environmental change may influence...

It has frequently been suggested that exceptionally large youth cohorts, the so-called “youth bulges,” make countries more susceptible to political violence. Within two prominent theoretical frameworks in the study of civil war, youth bulges are argued to potentially increase both opportunities and motives for political violence. This claim is empi...

Demographic and environmental factors have claimed a dominant position in the post-Cold War security discourse. A main proponent of what can be called a neo-Malthusian conflict scenario, Thomas Homer-Dixon, has argued that population pressure on natural renewable resources make societies more prone to armed conflict and civil war. While previous em...

The demography of armed conflict is an emerging field among demographers and peace researchers alike. The articles in this special issue treat demography as both a cause and a consequence of armed conflict, and they carry important policy implications. A study of German-allied countries during World War II addresses the role of refugees and territo...

There is a large pool of rigorous empirical studies investigating the relationship between ethnic heterogeneity and armed conflict. A general finding is that ethnicity matters, although not as much as portrayed in popular media. But a largely neglected aspect of these quantitative studies is how changes in the relative strength of groups affect con...

The takeover of the UN safearea of Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb forces inJuly 1995 was followed by the killing of alarge number of male Bosnian Muslim civilians,in what has been characterized as the worstmassacre in Europe since World War II. Thisarticle is based on a report submitted asevidence to the UN International CriminalTribunal for the former...

This paper attempts to go beyond cross-national studies on effects of population pressure on violent political conflict. Propositions that violent conflict may be associated with high population pressure on renewable natural resources, with youth bulges and with differential growth rates between ethnic and religious groups are tested in a time-seri...

There is a large pool of rigorous empirical studies investigating the relationship between ethnic heterogeneity and armed conflict. A general finding is that ethnicity is associated with a somewhat higher risk of conflict in bipolar societies with two large groups. Very fragmented societies, on the other hand, are not particularly conflict prone. B...

We have been asked by the Office of the Prosecutor to validate the number of missing persons in connection with the fall of the enclave of Srebrenica. In the process of preparing the report we ana-lysed the reliability of available data sources of missing persons from Srebrenica, which included studying the history, methods and procedures used for...

Debatten rundt de sikkerhetspolitiske konsekvensene av klimaendringene preges av sterke meninger og dra-matiske scenarier, der referanser til vitenskapelig for-skning om emnet er nesten helt fravaerende. Denne artikkelen oppsummerer foreslåtte kausalkjeder som knytter miljøendringer til konflikt og vurderer deres empiriske grunnlag. Til tross for e...

Demographic and environmental pressures have featured prominently in the debate over the new security challenges in the aftermath of the Cold War. The attention has primarily been on two arguably distinctive sets of population-conflict dynamics; the effect of population growth on dwindling resources, and the importance of age structure transition,...