Political conflict and violence shape the core demographic processes of mortality, migration, and fertility, while also influencing union formation, health, and kinship networks. Yet findings remain highly heterogeneous across space and time, which makes it difficult to derive general conclusions about the effects of “conflict” on demographic outcomes.
Our new special issue in Population and Development Review, Social and Demographic Consequences of Political Conflict and Violence, brings together research on how conflict and violence shape fertility, migration, health, families, and populations. In our introductory article, we ask how we can build cumulative knowledge from heterogeneous findings.
We argue that advancing a cumulative research program for conflict demography requires three tasks.
The first task is to distinguish exposure to conflict and violence from being affected by them and to take seriously the meaning-making through which disruptions are constituted as events to which demographic behavior responds. The second task is to identify a limited set of general social mechanisms linking conflict and violence to demographic outcomes. Contributions to this issue suggest at least three such mechanisms: uncertainty and insecurity, resources and institutional access, and linked lives. These same mechanisms connect conflict and violence to demographic outcomes but can produce different effects across contexts. The third task is distinctively demographic: to develop macro-level analyses of conflict-affected societies that examine population loss, distortions in population structures, cohort scarring, kinship attrition, and the spatial redistribution of populations. These population-level changes are explananda in their own right and cannot, as we shall argue, be adequately explained by micro-level mechanisms alone. We close by stressing that these three tasks of a demography of conflict demand methodological pluralism.
The twelve articles we assembled in this special issue put this program to work. They examine reproductive intentions in wartime Ukraine (Popovych, Perelli-Harris and Gerber 2026); displacement from Myanmar shaped by anticipatory, chronic, and imminent insecurity (Koning, Samari and Weitzman 2026); displacement within Gaza traced through digital data (Darin et al. 2026); fertility under conditions of “polycrisis” (Plach et al. 2026); homicide shocks and suicide (Caudillo and Lee 2026); the bereavement burden that conflict deaths impose on surviving kin (Acosta et al. 2026); intimate partner violence in the shadow of war (Lin and Smith-Greenaway 2026); child health under combined conflict and climatic stress (Thiede et al. 2026); the wartime redistribution of a national scientific workforce (Zaslavsky and Akbaritabar 2026); population dynamics in conflict settings (Silva and Snyder 2026); the sampling of hidden and legally precarious populations (Blanton et al. 2026); and the very construction of conflict-exposure measures (Luetke, Svallfors and Boyle 2026).
Read separately, each contribution to this special issue answers a question of its own: whether a husband’s war exposure raises his wife’s risk of violence, how quickly a population empties from a bombarded territory, how many relatives a single killing leaves bereaved. Read together, they show that the guiding question of conflict demography should not only be what conflict does to a given outcome but how conflict events become demographic: through what forms of affectedness, through which mechanisms, under which conditions, and with what consequences for populations as populations.
We present this special issue as a step toward a cumulative conflict demography.
Read the full article:
Mathis Ebbinghaus, Liliana Andriano, and Patrick Heuveline. 2026. “How Political Events Become Demographic: Toward a Cumulative Demography of Conflict and Violence,” Population and Development Review. https://doi.org/10.1111/padr.70092
About the editors
Mathis Ebbinghaus, University of Oxford and University of Klagenfurt
Liliana Andriano, University of Southampton
Patrick Heuveline, University of California, Los Angeles