Food Fight: The Effect of Food Availability on the Probability of Violent Conflict Onset

Graduation date: 2013In the past decade, scholars have increasingly turned to quantitative analysis to understand the complex interplay of factors driving intrastate conflict. International agencies, nonprofits and governments have maintained that food insecurity is a significant driver of violent conflict. This paper tests this popular assumption with a model drawn from Azar’s Theory of Protracted Social Conflict and a fixed effects logistic regression and finds that food availability has no significant effect on the probability of violent civil conflict onset. However, other factors such as a country’s level of integration into the international system of states and economic growth are likely to be more effective at maintaining global stability. The policy implications are that efforts to promote peace can be more effective by focusing on integration into the world community and economic growth than by focusing exclusively on food availability