Food Security and Social Cohesion among communities affected by violence and forced displacement in the Eastern Mediterranean.

This thesis is a collection of three articles in applied economics that explore food security and social cohesion among population affected by violence and forced displacement. Chapter II aims at quantifying the effect of violent conflict on food security and dietary quality in Iraq. Specifically, I estimate the effect of physical insecurity on caloric availability and household dietary diversity by using an instrumental variable (IV) approach. Results show that conflict has a positive (negative) effect of on per capita caloric availability (household dietary diversity). The direction of this relationship, although seemingly counterintuitive, is unsurprising given Iraq’s relatively high-income levels and large public food distribution system. Overall, the results suggest that, for countries transitioning to diets high in calories and fat, violent conflict may drive the population towards an unhealthier diet and may thus contribute to the nation’s growing prevalence of nutrition-related non-communicable diseases. In the third Chapter, I use a household dietary diversity score and a food consumption score to measure the effect of structural and physical Israeli settler violence on Palestinian food security in the occupied West Bank. In doing so, I employ a novel instrumental variable which correlates with settlement proximity while remaining exogenous to other confounders. According to the main results, both the presence of settlements and the insecurity they generate have a statistically significant negative effect on food security via continuous violence against Palestinians and their properties. This finding is further supported by a supplemental analysis of two potential underlying mechanisms: access to water and commuting time to the closest food market. The last empirical article in Chapter IV assesses the impact of the Education Program for Syrian Refugees and Host Communities (BILSY) implemented in Turkey. BILSY relied on positive contact to enhance trust and reciprocity among Syrian and Turkish children. Exploiting a unique primary data on Syrian and Turkish children, we1 investigate whether the BILSY program was effective in promoting social cohesion (altruism and trust) among them by running both dictator and trust games. The sample for the study is drawn from the BILSY program participants and it comprises 685 individuals of Turkish and Syrian background aged between 6 and 11 years old. Since all the participants received the treatment at some point, we randomized the time of interview, namely before or after receiving the treatment. We relied on the short length of the activities implemented to mimic a randomized control trial. Our results show that the program does not significantly affect the participants’ decisions during the games, neither towards children of different nationality, nor toward other fellow citizens.