The Lasting Effects of Political Conflict: Human and Economic Costs

When political conflicts and insurgencies erupt, the headlines focus on military strategies and territorial control. But the real and lasting damage unfolds far from the battlefield – in collapsed hospitals, empty food markets, shattered livelihoods, and the lives of millions of civilians who never chose to be part of any war. The costs of violent political conflict are not just measured in the number of combatants lost. They are measured in generations of children stunted by hunger, women subjected to violence as a weapon of war, economies that may take decades to recover, and communities permanently broken by displacement. Understanding these costs fully – especially through a gendered lens – is essential to grasping why political violence is not just a military or political issue, but a profound humanitarian one.

Human cost and displacement: the devastating toll on lives 🔗

The human cost of violent political conflict is staggering. According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, direct violence from post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan killed over 940,000 people between 2001 and 2023 – more than 432,000 of them civilians. But that figure is only the beginning. The same research estimates that an additional 3.6 to 3.8 million people died from indirect causes triggered by these wars – disease, malnutrition, healthcare collapse, and economic ruin – bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5 to 4.7 million and still counting.

Displacement is one of the most immediate and visible consequences of conflict. When armed groups move through territories and bombing campaigns destroy neighborhoods, people flee. They leave behind homes, livelihoods, and community networks. The ACAPS humanitarian monitoring for Afghanistan shows that in 2024 alone, 1.4 million displaced people were forcibly returned from Pakistan and Iran – many arriving back to a country with no jobs, no shelter, and no safety net. By 2025, nearly half of Afghanistan’s entire population – approximately 22.9 million people – required urgent humanitarian aid.

Internal displacement and its compounding effects 🔗

Displacement is rarely a one-time event. Many conflict-affected populations are displaced multiple times as fighting spreads or as ceasefire agreements collapse. The Carnegie Corporation’s review of the Costs of War research highlights that internal displacement significantly increases vulnerability to malnutrition, maternal complications, injury, and disease – consequences that weigh most heavily on women and children. In Afghanistan, decades of conflict have produced a multi-generational displacement crisis: by the end of 2023, one out of every six refugees globally was Afghan by birth, totaling roughly 6.1 million people.

The psychological toll is equally severe. An Oxfam study on Afghan experiences of conflict found that two in three Afghans are believed to suffer from depression or another mental disorder as a result of sustained conflict exposure. The voices collected in that research are telling: families describe chronic food insecurity, fear of the future, and the inability to leave even when they know they are in danger, simply because they have no money and nowhere else to go.

Food and economic insecurity: how conflict disrupts supply chains 🔗

Conflict does not just destroy infrastructure – it dismantles the entire systems that communities depend on to eat and survive. Agricultural land gets contaminated or abandoned. Trade routes shut down. Inflation surges as goods become scarce. Supply chains that once connected farmers to markets, and markets to families, collapse under the weight of ongoing violence and political instability.

Afghanistan provides one of the starkest illustrations. The Council on Foreign Relations reports that by March 2022, 95 percent of Afghan households did not have enough to eat, and six million people were classified as being on the brink of famine by August of that year. The situation has been compounded by the Taliban’s economic mismanagement, international sanctions, the suspension of foreign aid, and the revocation of the country’s central bank credentials – all of which have crippled the flow of money into ordinary households. Prices of basic goods skyrocketed: a loaf of bread in Afghanistan in January 2024 cost roughly 25 percent more than it did in January 2021, and rice was 30 percent more expensive. Meanwhile, 80 percent of Afghan families live on less than one dollar per person per day.

This pattern is not unique to Afghanistan. Across conflict zones, the breakdown of food supply chains is a direct and predictable consequence of sustained violence. Farmers cannot work land near active fighting. Aid organizations struggle to access populations in need. Governments divert budgets to military spending rather than food systems or social services, leaving civilians to cope with hunger in environments already stripped of their normal support mechanisms.

Gendered impacts: how women and children bear unique burdens 🔗

While everyone in a conflict zone suffers, women and children face distinct and compounded vulnerabilities that go well beyond the general population. Their suffering is not incidental – it is structural, predictable, and in many cases, deliberately inflicted.

Sexual violence as a weapon of war 🔗

The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights is unambiguous on this point: women and girls are increasingly and primarily targeted through sexual violence, including as a deliberate tactic of war. Rape, forced marriage, sexual slavery, and trafficking are used by armed groups to terrorize communities, destabilize social structures, and humiliate enemies. The scale is enormous: research cited by VoxDev estimates that 20,000 to 50,000 women were raped during the Bosnian war, 250,000 to 500,000 during the Rwandan genocide, and over 60,000 during the Sierra Leone Civil War. UN-verified cases of conflict-related sexual violence in 2024 were 50 percent higher than in 2023.

UN Women reports that the proportion of women killed in armed conflict doubled in 2023 alone. Every day, 500 women and girls in conflict-affected countries die from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth – largely because healthcare systems have been destroyed or are inaccessible. This figure is not just a statistic about health. It is evidence that conflict systematically strips women of the basic medical care they need to survive.

Women as displaced heads of households 🔗

When men are killed, detained, or conscripted into armed groups, women are often left as the sole providers for their families – in conditions that make that role nearly impossible to fulfill. Research published in Economic Policy finds that over 75 percent of displaced people are women and children, and in some refugee populations, that share climbs to 90 percent. Internally displaced women who are heads of households face loss of livelihoods, no access to reproductive healthcare, and heightened exposure to violence and trafficking – often with no formal support systems.

The long-term damage extends beyond the immediate crisis. Women who survive sexual violence in conflict zones frequently face social stigma and community isolation, which compounds their trauma and makes rebuilding their lives even harder. Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa shows that women who were exposed to armed conflict before the age of 20 are significantly more likely to accept domestic violence later in life – indicating that conflict reshapes gender norms in ways that perpetuate violence long after the shooting stops.

The particular vulnerability of children 🔗

UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell noted that by almost every measure, 2024 was one of the worst years on record for children in conflict situations in UNICEF’s history. The percentage of the world’s children living in conflict zones has doubled from around 10 percent in the 1990s to nearly 19 percent today. Children in conflict zones are far more likely to be out of school, malnourished, and forced from their homes – repeatedly. Girls face the additional risk of early and forced marriage, often justified by families as a measure of “protection” in settings where girls’ safety and families’ honor are seen as equivalent.

Long-term health and economic consequences 🔗

The economic wreckage of political conflict is not temporary. It accumulates, compounds, and outlasts the fighting itself by years – sometimes decades. Hospitals, schools, roads, banks, and government institutions are all dismantled by sustained violence, and rebuilding them requires resources that conflict-ravaged governments simply do not have.

The GDP collapse: what the IMF and World Bank data show 🔗

A landmark study on the macroeconomic costs of conflict, drawing on IMF World Economic Outlook data, found that GDP per capita is approximately 28 percent lower ten years after the onset of conflict compared to pre-conflict projections. Private consumption falls by nearly 25 percent over that same period. Exports drop by 58 percent and imports by 34 percent, reflecting how completely conflict severs countries from regional and global trade networks.

IMF economists writing in Finance & Development document equally dramatic figures at the country level. Yemen lost an estimated 25 to 35 percent of its GDP in 2015 alone. Syria saw consumer prices rise by approximately 600 percent between 2010 and late 2016. The World Bank estimated the damage from the Syrian conflict to be on the order of 300 billion dollars, with disruptions to economic organization estimated to be around 20 times more costly than physical capital destruction. Countries neighboring conflict zones also take a significant hit: those bordering high-intensity conflict areas in the Middle East and North Africa recorded an average GDP growth decline of 1.9 percentage points per year.

The IMF has also documented that the number of people living in extreme poverty globally rose by roughly 100 million to nearly 700 million during the Ukraine conflict period – with a significant share living in conflict regions. The economic shock of war is not contained within national borders. Fuel and food supply disruptions ripple across global markets, raising prices for populations far removed from the actual fighting.

Healthcare system collapse 🔗

Conflict does not merely prevent people from accessing healthcare – it actively destroys healthcare infrastructure. Hospitals become military targets. Medical personnel flee or are killed. Supply chains for medicines and equipment break down. The World Bank notes that in conflict-affected settings, the lack of access to health services, education, and employment disproportionately affects women and girls, compounding existing gender inequities that were present even before violence erupted. In Afghanistan, the 2025 reduction in US funding caused direct health facility closures, severing access to care for populations that had already been devastated by decades of conflict-induced healthcare collapse.

The long-term public health consequences of this infrastructure destruction are severe. Maternal and child mortality rises. Communicable diseases spread without treatment or containment. Mental health crises go unaddressed for lack of any psychiatric services. The Costs of War project estimates that 3.6 to 3.8 million indirect deaths in post-9/11 war zones were caused precisely by these ripple effects – disease, economic collapse, and the destruction of health infrastructure – affecting children most of all.

The cycle of poverty and conflict 🔗

One of the most insidious consequences of political conflict is how it creates the conditions for future conflict. When economies collapse, institutions fail, and populations are displaced and traumatized, the social fabric that holds communities together frays. Unemployment among young men creates recruitment pools for armed groups. Poverty and food insecurity generate grievances that insurgents exploit. This is why IMF estimates suggest that in the absence of conflicts since the 1970s, global GDP in 2014 would have been approximately 12 percent higher. The cost of war is not just what it destroys – it is also everything that never gets built because the conditions for development have been systematically dismantled.

Understanding the full scope of these costs – human, gendered, and economic – makes clear that political conflict and insurgency are not problems that resolve themselves when the fighting stops. The consequences are long, deep, and disproportionately borne by those who had the least power to start the war in the first place: civilians, women, children, and displaced communities trying to survive in the wreckage of someone else’s political struggle.

What do you think? Given that women and children consistently bear the heaviest burden of political conflict, why do women remain so underrepresented in peace negotiations – making up only 9.6 percent of negotiators in 2023 – and what would genuinely inclusive peacebuilding look like in practice? And when we consider that GDP per capita can remain 28 percent lower a full decade after conflict ends, how should international institutions rethink the relationship between post-conflict reconstruction funding and long-term gender-responsive development?

References

1. https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/costs/human
2. https://www.acaps.org/en/countries/afghanistan
3. https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/article/costs-war/
4. https://concernusa.org/news/afghanistan-crisis-explained/
5. https://www-cdn.oxfam.org/s3fs-public/file_attachments/afghanistan-the-cost-of-war_14.pdf
6. https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/war-afghanistan
7. https://www.ohchr.org/en/women/womens-human-rights-and-gender-related-concerns-situations-conflict-and-instability
8. https://voxdev.org/topic/social-protection/gender-dynamics-times-armed-conflict-victims-fighters-and-peacebuilders
9. https://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/press-release/2024/10/war-on-women-women-killed-in-armed-conflicts-double-in-2023
10. https://academic.oup.com/economicpolicy/article/40/124/807/8247963
11. https://wfmh.global/news/2025.25-02-27_declaration-on-women-and-children-in-war-and-conflict-zones
12. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016407042100001X
13. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2017/12/imus.htm
14. https://www.imf.org/en/publications/fandd/issues/2022/03/the-long-lasting-economic-shock-of-war
15. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2023/03/07/tackling-gender-based-violence-in-fragile-contexts
16. https://caspianpost.com/economics/geopolitical-conflicts-and-their-effects-on-innovation-and-economic-growth