Connecting Evidence and Policy for the Prevention of Armed Violence: New Tools for Practitioners and Policymakers

Why does armed violence occur and how can it be prevented? A new project from the Center on International Cooperation (CIC) at New York University (NYU), “Connecting evidence and policy for the prevention of armed violence,” aims to address this question.  Funded by the UK International Development from the UK government, the project aims to provide practitioners and policymakers with the means to develop prevention strategies grounded in recent academic research. 

What will the project do?

CIC’s research team is currently conducting a systematic review of the academic and policy literature on armed violence, including:

• Intra-state armed conflict,¹
• Violent extremism/terrorism by organized groups,²  and
• Violent extremism/terrorism by lone actors.³

The project will focus on three dimensions of these different types of armed violence, namely:

• Why armed violence occurs (“onset”);
• The spillover of armed violence to neighboring countries (“spillover”); and
• Recruitment into non-state armed groups (“recruitment”).

Using searches of academic databases and policy publications, the research team will identify relevant studies published between 2014 and 2024. Each study will then be reviewed in order to extract information on the factors that make onset, spillover, and recruitment more or less likely. The research team will examine these risk and protective factors to ascertain their relative importance, how they interact, and whether they are context-dependent or more broadly generalizable. Once the literature review is complete, the findings will be distilled into an easily searchable database that can be used by policymakers and practitioners to design evidence-based prevention strategies.

Why is the project useful? 

By creating a user-friendly database, the project aims to:

• Provide practitioners and policymakers with tools focused on violence prevention rather than response: While peace and security practitioners have several tools at their disposal to respond to armed violence, fewer tools are available for upstream violence prevention. The database of risk and protective factors fills a gap in this regard and practitioners can use this tool in a number of ways. For example, practitioners could ascertain if the same risk factors are responsible for different types of armed violence. If so, they could then design one single prevention program, rather than separate programs for different types of violence. In addition, practitioners could use the database to identify risk and protective factors that have previously been overlooked. These factors could then be incorporated into prevention programming.
• Bridge the gap between academic research and policy development: Despite advances in open access publishing, much academic research is located behind institutional paywalls and remains inaccessible to practitioners. By making recent research findings easily available, the database will allow practitioners to examine the empirical basis for different risk and protective factors. It will also help practitioners to see how commonly held assumptions about armed violence hold up against recent empirical research. Prevention programming could then be adjusted as necessary. Practitioners could also use the database to identify areas where more academic research is needed.
• Provide a jumping off point for participatory approaches to prevention: The database of risk and protective factors for armed violence could be used as a starting point for the participatory development of prevention strategies. For example, national authorities could use the database to start inclusive dialogue processes through which different stakeholders come to consensus on the particular factors to be prioritized and targeted for intervention. United Nations practitioners could also use the database as a starting point for discussions with national authorities.

For information on how this project links to the Pact for the Future, please see our latest  blog post: “Pact for the Future: How to Turn Pledges on Addressing Root Causes of Violence Into Action.”

For more general information on this project, please contact:

• Céline Monnier
• Joanne Richards

^[1] Intra-state armed conflict is a contested incompatibility between a state and non-state armed group inside the state’s territory that causes at least 25 battle-related deaths per year. See Therese Pettersson, “Armed Conflict Dataset Codebook Version 23.1,” UCDP/PRIO, 1, https://ucdp.uu.se/downloads/replication_data/2023_ucdp-prio-acd-231.pdf.

^[2] The term violent extremism is often used interchangeably with terrorism, and there is much debate as to the precise definitions of these terms and the extent to which they are conceptually distinct from other forms of armed conflict. We do not attempt to define these terms and will instead keep note of the various definitions used by different authors.

^[3] Lone actors are individuals who plan, prepare, and execute their attacks with a high degree of autonomy and who are not active participants of established terrorist groups or organizations (although they may be inspired by them). This definition is broadly recognized in the literature, see for example, B. Schuurman et al., “Who Commits Terrorism Alone? Comparing the Biographical Backgrounds and Radicalization Dynamics of Lone-Actor and Group-Based Terrorists,” Crime & Delinquency (2023), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00111287231180126.