Suchergebnisse

We examine how Syria's local growing seasons and precipitation variability affected patterns of violence during the country's civil war (2011–19). Among Syria's 272 subdistricts ( nahiyah), we study conflict events initiated by the Assad regime or its allies, and, separately, by other armed non-government groups ('rebels'). Throughout the war, violence to capture agriculture has been used regularly to control valuable cropland and harvests. Combatants also seek to deny their adversaries access to these resources by deploying violence to destroy agriculture. We test the hypothesis that conflict was most likely during local growing seasons due to both of these motivations. Additionally, we examine whether unusually dry conditions further elevated the risk of conflict during growing season months. A theory for why higher levels of conflict would occur during unusually dry conditions is that livelihood losses elevate incentives to control scarce crops and also facilitate recruitment of militants or their sympathizers. We find that violent events initiated by the government and rebel groups are both more likely during the growing season than other times of the year. There is also evidence that dry conditions during the growing season led to an increase in government-initiated attacks over the duration of the war. We find the strongest relationship between precipitation deficits and both government- and rebel-initiated violence in later years of the war. Compared with our growing season results, the rainfall deviation estimates are less consistent across models.

"The Geography of Civil War" published on by Oxford University Press.

A robust debate about the effects of climate change on conflict occurrences has attained wide public and policy attention, with sub-Saharan Africa generally viewed as most susceptible to increased conflict risk. Using a new disaggregated dataset of violence and climate anomaly measures (temperature and precipitation variations from normal) for sub-Saharan Africa 1980–2012, we consider political, economic, and geographic factors, not only climate metrics, in assessing the chances of increased violence. The location and timing of violence are influenced less by climate anomalies than by key political, economic, and geographic factors. Overall, the temperature effect is statistically significant, but important inconsistencies in the relationship between temperature extremes and conflict are evident in more nuanced relationships than have been previously identified.

We investigate insurgent-coalition interaction using the WikiLeaks dataset of Iraq war logs 2004-2009. After a review of existing theoretical interventions on the dynamics of insurgency and presenting a baseline model of violent events, we test a conceptual model of reciprocity using an innovative space-time Granger causality technique. Our estimation procedure retains predicted probabilities of reaction in response to a previous opponent's action across different temporal and spatial configurations in Iraq and in Baghdad. Our conclusions about conflict in Iraq are based on these profiles of risk-what we call space-time signatures. We find strong evidence of "tit-for-tat" associations between coalition/Iraq forces on one side and insurgents/militants on the other. Specifically, we find that the action-reaction association varies strongly by majority ethnic region across Iraq and in Baghdad, by urban and nonurban location, and within Sunni-dominated areas, by district income. While violence is strongly temporally dependent in the same location, the effect of distance varies significantly across the different subsets of the Iraq data. (International Interactions/FUB)