# **1 Introduction**

According to official statistics, 82.4 million people were forcibly displaced at the end of 2020, including 48 million internally displaced persons (UNHCR 2021). Recent reports suggest that the total number of forcibly displaced people worldwide has now risen to above 100 million.<sup>1</sup> In many displacement settings, people flee political violence. In fact, all six “Level 3” (that is, most severe) emergencies as classified by the World Food Programme are the direct result of violent conflict (WFP, 2020).<sup>2</sup> In addition, women and girls are often at particular risk in these situations, as they are faced with vulnerabilities, persecution and forms of violence that are based on their gender (World Bank, 2017).

However, how the three dimensions of forced displacement, gender and violence jointly shape people’s behaviors and outcomes in conflict crises is not well understood and data-driven empirical evidence is particularly scarce (Brück and Stojetz, 2021). Such evidence is particularly needed for humanitarian emergency settings, where individuals and households rely even more on interventions than in other, more peaceful settings. Specifically, it is necessary to inform an emerging class of new interventions that seek to bridge the gap between those operating at the so-called humanitarian–development–peacebuilding (HDP) triple nexus and those trying to foster durable solutions (DS) for forcibly displaced people (Nguya and Siddiqui, 2020).

In this paper, we study adverse coping behaviors among forcibly displaced and non-displaced people in North-east Nigeria, a humanitarian, development and conflict crisis setting (WFP, 2021). To do so, we take an intersectional perspective (Bastia, 2014; Agbonifo, 2020), which emphasizes the relationships and interactions between different explanatory factors and across the individual and group levels for understanding behaviors and outcomes (Kapilashrami and Hankivsky, 2018). Specifically, we analyze how gender, displacement status and local violence shocks (the ‘factors’) shape coping behaviors at the household, adult and child levels (across ‘levels’), and pay particular attention to household composition by gender and age.

For the empirical analysis, we combine unique household survey data and high-quality conflict event data from North-east Nigeria. We use the new “Nigeria IDP Survey 2018” dataset (Pape and Kwenin, 2018), which is based on a household survey sample that is representative of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in North-east Nigeria. In enumeration areas located in host communities, the survey also collected information from a sample of non-IDPs that is representative of the nondisplaced population in host communities. The dataset contains observations from 17,951 individuals from 2,947 households: 8,524 IDPs (1,437 households), and 9,427 non-IDPs (1,510 households). The dataset provides detailed socio-economic information from all households and individuals, as well as displacement information for IDPs. We spatio-temporally match the survey data with conflict event data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED). The ACLED data allows us to calculate an indicator of the local intensity of armed-group violence based on the number of documented violent events in the 12 months prior to the survey.

> 1 See: <u>https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/05/1118772 (accessed May 30, 2022).</u>

> 2 These are the Democratic Republic of the Congo, North-east Nigeria, the Sahel, South Sudan, the Syrian Arab Republic and the Republic of Yemen.

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