Improving the Early Warning Function of Civil War Onset Models Using Automated Event Data

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannes RRRs ◽  
Artur N Usanov ◽  
Nicholas Farnham ◽  
Tim Sweijs
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Early Warning ◽  
Event Data ◽  
Civil War Onset

Rethinking the Conflict “Resource Curse”: How Oil Wealth Prevents Center-Seeking Civil Wars

2016 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 727-761 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Paine
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Formal Model ◽  
Resource Curse ◽  
Revenue Sources ◽  
Societal Challenges ◽  
The Government ◽  
Oil Wealth ◽  
Oil Revenues ◽  
Civil War Onset

AbstractA broad literature on how oil wealth affects civil war onset argues that oil production engenders violent contests to capture a valuable prize from vulnerable governments. By contrast, research linking oil wealth to durable authoritarian regimes argues that oil-rich governments deter societal challenges by strategically allocating enormous revenues to enhance military capacity and to provide patronage. This article presents a unified formal model that evaluates how these competing mechanisms affect overall incentives for center-seeking civil wars. The model yields two key implications. First, large oil-generated revenues strengthen the government and exert an overall effect that decreases center-seeking civil war propensity. Second, oil revenues are less effective at preventing center-seeking civil war relative to other revenue sources, which distinguishes overall and relative effects. Revised statistical results test overall rather than relative effects by omitting the conventional but posttreatment covariate of income per capita, and demonstrate a consistent negative association between oil wealth and center-seeking civil war onset.

Forecasting Civil Wars: Theory and Structure in an Age of “Big Data” and Machine Learning

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (10) ◽  
pp. 1885-1915 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Blair ◽  
Nicholas Sambanis
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Structural Characteristics ◽  
Value Added ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
Forecasting Accuracy ◽  
Conflict Escalation ◽  
Parsimonious Model ◽  
Temporal Windows ◽  
Civil War Onset

Does theory contribute to forecasting accuracy? We use event data to show that a parsimonious model grounded in prominent theories of conflict escalation can forecast civil war onset with high accuracy and over shorter temporal windows than has generally been possible. Our forecasting model draws on “procedural” variables, building on insights from the contentious politics literature. We show that a procedural model outperforms more inductive, atheoretical alternatives and also outperforms models based on countries’ structural characteristics, which previously dominated models of civil war onset. We find that process can substitute for structure over short forecasting windows. We also find a more direct connection between theory and forecasting than is sometimes assumed, though we suggest that future researchers treat the value-added of theory for prediction not as an assumption but rather as a hypothesis to test.

scholarly journals Conflict Environments and Civil War Onset

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindsay Reid ◽  
Rachel Myrick ◽  
Kelly M Kadera ◽  
Mark J C Crescenzi
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Empirical Models ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Temporal Dimensions ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Civil War Onset

Abstract The spread of civil war poses serious risks and costs. We argue that conflict environments, which vary across time and space, systematically exacerbate the spread of civil war. As conflict in a state’s neighborhood becomes more spatially proximate and as lingering effects of conflict accumulate over time, that state’s risk of civil war onset increases. To theorize and test this argument, we construct the conflict environment (CE) score, a concept that taps into spatial and temporal dimensions of violence in a state’s neighborhood. Using the CE score in established empirical models of civil war onset, we demonstrate that a dangerous conflict environment consistently elevates the risk of civil war, outperforming traditional measures of nearby violence, even when domestic factors are taken into account.

Cross-Cuttingness, Cleavage Structures and Civil War Onset

2010 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Sawat Selway
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Significant Determinant ◽  
Ethnic Fractionalization ◽  
Public Opinion Surveys ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Cleavage Structure ◽  
Civil War Onset

This article seeks to further our understanding of how social structure affects the onset of civil war. Existing studies to date have been inconclusive, focusing only on single-cleavage characteristics of social structure, such as ethnic or religious fractionalization. This study argues that models that do not take into account the relationship between cleavages (or cleavage structure) are biased and thus reach faulty conclusions. With the focus on the cleavages of ethnicity and religion, the effects of two characteristics of cleavage structure on civil war onset (cross-cuttingness and cross-fragmentation) are defined and tested. A new index of ethno-religious cross-cuttingness (ERC), derived from national public opinion surveys, reveals that ERC is a significant determinant of civil war onset when interacted with ethnic fractionalization.

Terrorism and Civil War: A Spatial and Temporal Approach to a Conceptual Problem

2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael G. Findley ◽  
Joseph K. Young
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Event Data ◽  
Conceptual Problem ◽  
Temporal And Spatial Patterns ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
High Degree ◽  
The Relationship

What is the relationship between civil war and terrorism? Most current research on these topics either explicitly or implicitly separates the two, in spite of compelling reasons to consider them together. In this paper, we examine the extent to which terrorism and civil war overlap and then unpack various temporal and spatial patterns. To accomplish this, we use newly geo-referenced terror event data to offer a global overview of where and when terrorist events happen and whether they occur inside or outside of civil war zones. Furthermore, we conduct an exploratory analysis of six separate cases that have elements of comparability but also occur in unique contexts, which illustrate some of the patterns in terrorism and civil war. The data show a high degree of overlap between terrorism and ongoing civil war and, further, indicate that a substantial amount of terrorism occurs prior to civil wars in Latin America, but yet follows civil war in other regions of the world. While the study of terrorism and of civil war mostly occurs in separate scholarly communities, we argue for more work that incorporates insights from each research program and we offer a possibility for future research by considering how geo-referenced terror and civil war data may be utilized together. More generally, we expect these results to apply to a wide variety of attitudes and behaviors in contentious politics.

Sensitivity Analysis of Empirical Results on Civil War Onset

2006 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 508-535 ◽  
Author(s):  
Håvard Hegre ◽  
Nicholas Sambanis
Keyword(s):  
Sensitivity Analysis ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Empirical Results ◽  
Civil War Onset
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