Revisiting the Link between Natural Disasters and Civil Conflicts
Publisher: Conflict Management and Peace Science
Author(s): Yasutaka Tominaga and Chia-yi Lee
Date: 2026
Topics: Conflict Causes, Disasters
This research note revisits the link between natural disasters and civil unrest and argues that the relationship is inverted U-shaped. Natural disasters are likely to stimulate political violence, but only when the severity of the disaster is modest. The authors test this argument by replicating five existing studies and find partially supportive results. After the authors add a squared term of the variable that measures disaster severity to the model, they find an inverted-U relationship between natural disasters and conflict incidents, conflict duration, and rebel resilience. Models that use conflict onset as the dependent variable, however, do not show clear nonlinearity.