The article provides a global overview of the food security and conflict situation and discusses the two-way relationship between violent conflict and food security. On the one hand, violent conflict directly impacts food systems, affecting people’s ability to produce, trade, and access food. On the other, heightened food insecurity can contribute to the emergence and duration of conflict. The pathways leading from violent conflict to food insecurity or from food insecurity to conflict are highly complex and deeply contextual. The article draws from major current conflict settings to illustrate these complexities, including the unfolding armed conflict in Ukraine, with implications for food security felt far beyond the conflict-affected areas. The article concludes by arguing that there is an urgent need for incorporating a peace and conflict lens when conceptualising food security to promote a more holistic response across humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding spheres to the rapidly increasing levels of food insecurity. In doing so, it is fundamental to consider agency within a framing of food security. This factor is largely missing from the dominant technocratic or purely economic understanding of food security.

Cash and voucher assistance (CVA) has become a widespread humanitarian tool to support people affected by conflicts, displacement, and disasters. It promises improved ways to meet the diverse needs of aid beneficiaries. Current policy and academic debates mainly centre on technocratic questions concerning economy, effectiveness, and equity, and, to a lesser extent, the effects on individual recipients and households. This paper challenges the assumption of CVA as a linear process and argues that the shift to CVA is more than changing the aid delivery platform. It contends that scholarship and practice have so far overlooked the social meaning of money, and therefore its broader implications for humanitarian aid and local markets. The paper presents evidence that CVA impacts on social relations and risks creating new, or exacerbating existing, conflicts in already fragile contexts. It highlights less explored areas of CVA and outlines a multidimensional research agenda that emphasises its potential social and socioeconomic consequences.

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This paper explores how climate change, violent conflict, the Covid-19 pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis combine to drive rapidly increasing levels of food insecurity. These drivers play out differently across and within regions and countries, and this paper focuses on how a combination of the drivers plays out on the African continent. It looks at four subregions—North Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, and Central and Southern Africa—and several countries within these regions. Africa is the continent with the highest proportion of people—just over 20 per cent— facing hunger. Africa also carries the heaviest burden from the impact of climate change. In 2021 18 countries in sub-Saharan Africa experienced armed conflicts. The economic fallout of climate change, conflict and the Covid-19 pandemic has widened inequality and sharpened societal divisions. Addressing the impacts of these compounding crises and breaking the vicious cycle of climate change, food insecurity and conflict requires a concerted effort by local, national, regional and global humanitarian, development and peacebuilding actors, governments and donors. To this end, the paper concludes with nine recommendations on the way forward.