Abstract: Conflict scholarship conceptualizes violence, such as forced displacement, as discrete exposure and examines its post-conflict effects. These approaches overlook prolonged harm: mundane and ongoing hardship that persists and cumulates beyond episodic violence and shapes how individuals experience change. I propose a conceptual framework that considers harm across the psychological, structural, material, and social and emotional dimensions of victims’ lives, with attention to temporal and cumulative processes. I address harm’s subtleties, endogeneity, and other inferential challenges, proposing approaches for studying harm for differing methodological orientations. To demonstrate the framework’s traction, I draw on interview-based field research with Syrian refugees navigating two major, distinct events late in their displacement: natural disaster and regime change. Both activated and exposed the cumulated harm of conflict victims.

About the speaker: Rana Khoury is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University’s Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance. She earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from Northwestern University and an M.A. in Arab Studies from Georgetown University. Her research focuses on comparative politics, particularly conflict, displacement, humanitarianism, and wartime civic action, with a regional emphasis on Syria and the Middle East. She is the author of Civilizing Contention: International Aid in Syria’s War (Cornell University Press), recipient of the APSA-MENA Junior Scholar Book Award (2026).

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