Suchergebnisse

1. The emergence of conflict hot spots -- 2. A location-based account of conflict hosting and hot spots -- 3. The hosting of international conflicts -- 4. The causes of conflict hot spots -- 5. Hot spots and the diffusion of international conflict -- 6. The consequences of conflict hot spots.

The Militarized Interstate Dispute Location (MIDLOC) dataset addresses a significant lacuna in the empirical literature on the geography of interstate conflict: the dearth of location-level data. This dataset provides details of the geographic location of Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) onsets between 1816 and 2001. These data on locations are available at both the dispute-level (for 1816—2001) and the incident-level (for 1993—2001). This article briefly identifies the motivation behind this data-collection project, details some of the coding procedures followed in assembling the MIDLOC dataset, and then offers some mapped visualizations of the variance in this dataset across time. These maps are designed, in part, to stimulate additional hypothesis derivation in work on the geography of conflict. The data are then employed to offer a geographic assessment of the proposition that democracies tend to conduct the majority of their conflicts on their opponents' territories. The article then concludes with a discussion of some additional potential applications of the MIDLOC dataset.

The collapse of Mobutu's Zaire and the arrival of father and son Kabila regimes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (hereafter, the DRC) were hastened by the dramatic and tumultuous spread of violence from neighboring Rwanda. Mobutu's state's inability to manage the influx of Hutu refugees (with Interahamwe militia members interspersed) into the Kivu province of eastern Zaire from Rwanda's bloody genocide of 1994 or to compensate for the ratcheting up of their cross-border skirmishes with the Banyamulenge (Zairean Tutsi) population in 1996, exacerbated extant tensions and has since resulted in more than a dozen years of civil war. This example prompts us to ask: are countries with higher levels of state capacity better able to resist the spread of violence from neighboring territories into their own? The author argues that when falsely divided notions of spatial heterogeneity and dependence are interacted, contagion from neighboring conflicts becomes a risk of diminishing value for increasingly capable states. A model of civil war contagion affirms a conditional hypothesis, showing that state capacity modifies the likelihood that a state will become infected by a civil conflict occurring in neighboring territories.

A thriving literature investigates the claim that geographic processes cause military conflict to cluster and diffuse. With the recent update of the Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) data and the collection of geographic locations to accompany these data, it is now possible to offer a location-based examination of the geographic spread of conflict. Consideration of the literature that identifies a role for physical geography in conflict processes leads to the derivation of hypotheses in which territory and resources are expected to provide incentives for states to seek to increase territorial acquisitions, while impassable terrain is expected to act as a barrier to such spread. These hypotheses are tested using ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation - regressing the spread of individual MIDs in the years 1993-2001 upon a range of location- and dispute-specific variables. These regressions demonstrate that the spread of individual disputes is a function of the issue over which they are fought, the presence of vital resources in the host country, the prevailing terrain of that country, and the relevant conflict history of the participants. It is argued that knowledge of the precipitants of the spread of individual conflicts is of great benefit to policymakers seeking to mitigate the detrimental impact of conflict upon the societies in which it occurs, as well as to those deploying peacekeeping troops to conflict zones.