When Hazards Collide: Conflict, Displacement, and Education System Disruption in Northern Syria

Sammanfattning

Across the world's most fragile settings, young people rarely face just one crisis at a time. When armed conflicts and natural hazards coincide, their compounded impact on education systems frequently exceeds the sum of their individual effects - a non-linearity that conventional single-hazard frameworks are ill-equipped to capture. This thesis contributes to multihazard analysis and planning by testing a novel theoretical framework and research design. The study uses the 2023 Türkiye/Syria Earthquakes as a natural experiment to examine local compound effects and displacement-mediated spillover effects on education systems. I combine 48 rounds of humanitarian surveys across 2,674 communities in Northern Syria over 2022–23 with geocoded conflict information, an earthquake intensity scale, and monthly district-level displacement data. The results show that coinciding hazards interact through pre-existing vulnerability structures, and that geography determines where harm concentrates. Communities whose education systems were already chronically stressed by long-term conflict were more likely to suffer the direct effects of the earthquake, with impact severity increasing relative to pre-earthquake conflict exposure. School accessibility was reduced by supply, demand, and systemic factors in both directly affected areas and those reached through displacement spillovers. Compounding disasters are increasingly the norm in fragile settings. This study builds the case for anticipatory planning, sustained financing, and multihazard frameworks to be embedded in how the international community responds to complex crises.