Development in reverse’? A longitudinal analysis of armed conflict, fragility and school enrolment
By IOE Blog Editor, on 7 April 2017
Tuesday 13th May 2014, 17:30 – 19:00, Room 802, 20 Bedford Way, Institute of Education, London
Dr Robin Shields (University of Bath) and Dr Julia Paulson (Bath Spa University)
In this seminar, we present a longitudinal analysis of cross-national data on armed conflict, state fragility, and enrolment in primary and secondary schooling. The study is motivated by questions raised in the 2012 Human Security Report, which challenges the widely-held assumption that conflict is necessarily detrimental to educational outcomes. Our findings suggest that growth in enrolment is significantly lower in conflict-affected countries but that the effect is dependent upon countries’ overall enrolment level. However, when we control for fragility, the effect of conflict is not significant, and fragility offers more explanation of changes in enrolment levels. We use these findings to scrutinise how state fragility is defined and operationalised using multivariate statistics.