Our paper shows that coping behaviors in conflict crises are strongly shaped by the intersectionality of gender, forced displacement and violence. We find that in conflict crises, gender, displacement status and local violence shocks can create compounding challenges across multiple levels of observation. These compounding challenges have significant welfare implications and create particular risks and vulnerabilities for specific groups of households and individuals.

We document that specific types of households are more likely than others to engage in adverse food-related coping behaviors (we will refer to as ‘harmful food coping’ as shorthand): IDP households; households that rely more on female breadwinners; households with many children; and households in violent rural areas. Women face strong gender-based barriers to being economically active and working IDP women face additional disadvantages due to their displacement status to securing productive work outside agriculture. Children in these household types not only bear the disadvantages in well-being at the household level, but these also put their education at risk, especially that of girls.

Our study is related to two broad academic literatures. First, we add to the cross-disciplinary literature on conflict-induced forced displacement, which has produced detailed insights into the causes, characteristics and consequences of forced displacement (Ruiz and Vargas-Silva, 2013, Bohnet et al. 2018; Hartman et al., 2021; Canavan and Turkoglu, 2022). It is now increasingly recognized that displaced women and girls often face numerous gender-specific challenges and vulnerabilities (El-Bushra, 2000; World Bank, 2017) and that displacement research can benefit strongly from analyses through a gender lens and feminist approaches (Brickell and Speer, 2020; Singh, 2021). In a similar vein, there is growing awareness that many behaviors and outcomes in settings of forced displacement will not have mono-causal or mono-level explanations. Rather, multiple (‘intersecting’) factors across multiple levels of society need to be considered, and the way they are interconnected (Yacob-Haliso, 2016; Kapilashrami and Hankivsky, 2018; Agbonifo, 2020). However, empirical evidence from such intersectionality- and gender-based analyses of conflict settings remains scarce, especially micro-level, quantitative evidence. We contribute such evidence by studying quantitatively how forced displacement, gender and violence jointly shape crisis responses at three levels of observation (the household, adult and child levels).

Second, we contribute to a better understanding of conflict crises. Conflict crises present affected populations with various forms of adverse conditions. However, how different (groups of) people experience these conditions is likely to be highly heterogeneous but under-researched (Brück et al; 2016). Coping behaviors in particular are at the core of how individuals experience and survive acute conflict situations (Lautze, 2006). Yet, high-quality large-N quantitative information on conditions, exposure, and behaviors in these contexts is scarce, as collecting it is inherently difficult, due to access, safety and ethical concerns (Kolade et al., 2019; Sarzin, 2017). At the same time, micro-level data and evidence are key to understanding conflict outcomes and impacts (Canetti et al., 2017; Bohnet et al., 2018; Hartman et al., 2021; Canavan and Turkoglu, 2022), as well as informing policies to protect and support lives and livelihoods in conflict situations. Our study matches high quality survey and conflict event data to produce disaggregated insights into how households, adults and children react to the complex challenges conflict crises entail.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the context of our study. Section 3 presents our methodological approach. Section 4 introduces the data and provides 3