Living in the Shadow of Protracted Border Disputes: A Socio-Psychological Study of Displacement and Economic Insecurity

Abstract

Protracted border disputes rarely end in a single decisive event; instead, they settle into the landscape as a chronic condition that residents inhabit for decades. This paper synthesises psychological, economic, and political-geography scholarship to examine how populations living along contested and militarised borders experience displacement and economic insecurity as intertwined, mutually reinforcing conditions rather than separate hardships. Drawing on systematic reviews of mental health among internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees, borderland ethnographies, and economic assessments of trade disruption, the paper argues that the psychological toll of border conflict is inseparable from the erosion of livelihoods, land access, and social continuity that accompanies it. Using the Line of Control (LoC) between India and Pakistan, the Sudan-South Sudan and Darfur borderlands, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Great Lakes frontier, and the Syria-Lebanon border as illustrative regional cases, the paper documents convergent findings: elevated and highly variable prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety (ranging from single digits to over 80% across settings); sustained loss of agricultural and trade-based livelihoods; and a distinctive psychology of “perpetual insecurity” in which residents cannot fully return to normal life even during lulls in violence. The paper situates these findings within Conservation of Resources theory, the daily-stressors framework, and acculturation-stress models, and it examines the topic from multiple analytical vantages — state-security, human-security, feminist political economy, and clinical-epidemiological — to show how each lens foregrounds different harms and different policy remedies. The paper concludes that durable responses to protracted border disputes require integrating mental health services, livelihood restoration, and cross-border economic normalisation rather than treating trauma and poverty as separate policy silos.