Reducing the growth of violent movements is a perennial challenge for the international community, in large part due to the multitude of reasons why people engage in violence. While there is limited evidence that economic programs—such as those that improve employment—by themselves can curb engagement in political violence, as shown by research by Mercy Corps and others, such interventions are still a preferred approach of numerous development actors working to promote stability in fragile and conflict-affected countries. In places such as Afghanistan, donors and development practitioners invest heavily in youth interventions focused on creating employment as one of the means to dissuade youth from supporting armed opposition groups (AOGs). Additionally, there is often a tendency to lump all types of violence together, not recognizing that political violence may require different solutions than gang-related, criminal, or interpersonal violence. Consequently, the limited amount of evidence from rigorous program impact evaluations relating to political violence makes it difficult to reach definitive conclusions about the causal link between economic conditions and political violence.
In response to this apparent knowledge gap, Mercy Corps, in collaboration with the Political Violence FieldLab at Yale University and Princeton University, and with financial support from the United States Institute of Peace, undertook a randomized controlled trial with 1,590 participants to test the impact of particular economic interventions— specifically a youth employability program and cash transfers—on youth attitudes toward and willingness to support political violence. Mercy Corps implemented these economic interventions under a US government–funded project known as INVEST in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. The program’s primary goal is to help vulnerable Afghan youth develop skills that are responsive to local labor market needs and to help them secure economic opportunities rather than reducing political violence specifically. However, we used this opportunity to test whether a program designed explicitly to improve economic outcomes can also affect support for political violence. The main component of the INVEST program is technical and vocational education and training (TVET), which includes three- and six-month courses for young men and women. Unconditional cash transfers were provided as an additional intervention—separate from the INVEST program and solely for the purposes of this research—to a random subsample of participants to test the effects of cash transfers on economic and violence outcomes, both in the short term and six to nine months after the intervention. Additionally, we tested why vocational training and cash transfers may affect support for political violence, beyond the economic reasons, by examining how the interventions affected psychosocial well-being and perceptions of the government in the short term.