War comes home: Conflict exposure and intimate partner violence in Ethiopia

Armed conflict can increase risks of violence within households, including intimate partner violence (IPV), that is, physical, sexual, or psychological harm inflicted by a current or former partner. Existing evidence links conflict exposure to IPV, but little is known about how IPV risk scales with the intensity of nearby violence, whether conflict exacerbates pre-existing IPV, contributes to new IPV, or both, and the household-level mechanisms that may underlie these associations. We examine these questions in Ethiopia, a country affected by recent large-scale conflict. We link geolocated conflict events from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED) to six waves of household panel data collected across five regions between 2016 and 2021, and estimate individual fixed-effects models. A one standard deviation increase in local conflict events is associated with a 1.6 percentage point (pp) increase in the probability of reporting any IPV, a 1.1 pp increase in the probability of physical IPV, and a 1.1 pp increase in the probability of sexual IPV, corresponding to 7%, 11%, and 33% of the respective outcome means. The association rises with conflict intensity: each additional conflict event predicts higher IPV, whereas the presence of an isolated event does not. Associations are concentrated among women reporting no lifetime IPV at baseline. Conflict exposure predicts higher psychological distress in both partners, reduced working hours, lower husband income, and greater acceptance of wife-beating. The findings suggest that IPV prevention, integrated with mental health and livelihood support, belongs in the core of responses to escalating conflict.