The cuts to USAID (the United States Agency for International Development) in early 2025 are associated with significant increases in violent conflict in regions covering most of the African continent, a new study reports. "The obvious temptation is to read the findings … as evidence that more aid reduces conflict," writes Axel Dreher in a related Perspective. "That would be misleading. What the authors identify is the effect of a sudden and unexpected disruption. Abrupt withdrawal removes resources, but it also interrupts contracts, staffing, procurement, and expectations. It can leave local governments, intermediaries, and citizens confronting not just scarcity but broken commitments. The effect may therefore reflect institutional disruption as much as the absence of aid itself and be much different from gradual reductions in aid." USAID was one of the world's largest providers of foreign assistance, operating in more than 100 countries and supporting initiatives ranging from public health, and agriculture to education, disaster relief and democratic institutions. However, less than a week after its inauguration, the second Trump administration issued sweeping cuts to USAID, marking a dramatic shift in more than 60 years of U.S. foreign policy. Emerging medical research has already linked these cuts to severe humanitarian consequences, including potentially millions of additional deaths. Yet the consequences of the sudden removal of foreign aid on political instability and different types of violence, such as armed clashes, protests and riots, or attacks on civilians, aren't fully understood.
To address this gap, Dominic Rohner and colleagues examined the impact of USAID funding cuts on conflict across 870 subnational regions covering most of the African continent. Rohner et al. combined two detailed datasets for their analysis: the Geocoded Official Development Assistance Dataset (GODAD), which tracks foreign aid disbursements and project locations worldwide, and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), which records violent events. By merging these two sources, the authors were able to link patterns of past aid distribution to subsequent patterns of violence and assess whether areas that had previously received more USAID support experienced more or different types of conflict after the aid was withdrawn. The findings show that the withdrawal of USAID is associated with significant increases in violent conflict, armed clashes, protests, and riots – particularly in regions that received substantial U.S. aid. These effects appeared immediately after USAID removal and persisted for months. What's more, Rohner et al. found that local institutional strength further impacted these effects – weaker states experienced more pronounced increases in conflict following aid cuts, while stronger institutions more substantially mitigated the harms.
For reporters interested in topics of research integrity, Dominic Rohner notes: "Science integrity is of key importance, and now with AI it becomes cheaper to produce papers, some of which may not meet scientific standards. The role of the academic community and of leading scholarly journals is to screen between cutting-edge work and outputs of lower quality. The progress of humanity hinges on sound scientific knowledge. Widely available sound information and knowledge are not only the preconditions for government accountability but allow our economies to flourish. In economics, the leading journals have now embraced rigorous open data and replication requirements, which aims to foster scientific integrity."
