Regional Analysis: Conflict as a Threat to Quality of Life

Integrating conflict as an endogenous factor reveals distinct, self-reinforcing threats to quality of life across different regions. Each region faces a unique manifestation of the conflict equilibrium, driven by its specific historical, geographic, and institutional context.

Sub-Saharan Africa

Primary Conflict Driver: Governance vacuums, ethnic competition, and the "resource curse."

Threats to Quality of Life:

Pervasive food insecurity and famine, used as a weapon of war. Systemic collapse of public health systems, leading to resurgence of preventable diseases and high maternal/child mortality. deliberate targeting of schools and students, creating a lost generation without education. Widespread sexual violence as a tactic of war, causing profound and lasting trauma.

Vicious Cycle: Competition over scarce resources and political power fuels conflicts that destroy the very infrastructure and social trust needed to manage those resources peacefully, leading to further scarcity and more conflict.

The Middle East and North Africa

Primary Conflict Driver: Sectarian divides, geopolitical proxy wars, and struggles over state legitimacy.

Threats to Quality of Life:

The largest population of internally displaced persons and refugees globally, leading to a loss of home, community, and identity. Comprehensive destruction of urban infrastructure, from water systems to historic cultural sites. Mass psychological trauma and a crisis of mental health across the population. A shattered social contract, where the state is viewed as a predator rather than a protector.

Vicious Cycle: Geopolitical rivalries fund and fuel internal sectarian conflicts, which fracture national identity and institutions, making the region a permanent arena for external interference.

Eastern Europe & The Former Soviet Sphere

Primary Conflict Driver: Revanchist geopolitics, contested borders, and energy security.

Threats to Quality of Life:

Weaponization of energy and food supplies, leading to economic instability and hardship far beyond the immediate conflict zone. Coercive population displacement and cultural assimilation policies. Erosion of democratic institutions and civil liberties under the pretext of national security. The psychological burden of a resurgent and immediate military threat, reversing decades of post-Cold War stability.

Vicious Cycle: Military aggression creates a security dilemma that justifies authoritarian consolidation and militarization, which in turn increases regional tensions and the likelihood of further conflict.

Latin America

Primary Conflict Driver: Weak state presence, institutional corruption, and powerful non-state actors (cartels, gangs).

Threats to Quality of Life:

Some of the highest homicide rates in the world, not from war, but from criminal violence. Criminal governance in marginalized areas, where gangs, not the state, provide order and collect "taxes." Pervasive extortion that stifles small business and economic development. Forced displacement within and across borders due to criminal territorial control.

Vicious Cycle: High inequality and lack of opportunity provide a ready recruitment pool for criminal organizations, whose violence and corruption further weaken state institutions, perpetuating the conditions of inequality.

East and Southeast Asia

Primary Conflict Driver: Geopolitical tensions, maritime territorial disputes, and internal ethnic strife.

Threats to Quality of Life:

The threat of devastating regional war over flashpoints like Taiwan or the South China Sea, which would disrupt the global economy. The internal repression of minority groups, denying them political voice, cultural expression, and basic rights. The securitization of daily life and the suppression of civil liberties under nationalist regimes. Economic coercion used as a political tool, creating uncertainty for trade-dependent nations.

Vicious Cycle: Rising nationalism justifies increased military spending and authoritarian control, which escalates regional security dilemmas and suppresses internal dissent, fueling further nationalist rhetoric.

Synthesis and Global Threat

The universal threat across all regions is the normalization of a Conflict Equilibrium, where economic activity, political life, and social relations reorganize around the logic of violence and predation, rather than cooperation and production. This represents a fundamental and systemic degradation of quality of life. The regional variations demonstrate that this is not a single problem, but a pattern that adapts to local conditions. The interconnectedness of the global system means that these regional conflict equilibria create cascading threats worldwide, in the form of refugee crises, disrupted supply chains, economic instability, and the erosion of the international norms that have underpinned global development for decades.