| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
172329
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
How does diffusion of civil war battles influence conflict termination? Recent advances in civil war literature have found that battle dynamics shape conflict termination by affecting the intra-conflict bargaining between disputants. This article extends the theoretical perspective and argues that how battles diffuse matters in determining conflict termination. While battlefield dynamics should in principle reveal previously unavailable private information, the relevance of information-revealing effect depends on the diffusion patterns of battles. The persistent, and possibly battle-exacerbated, commitment problem can also alter the prospects of conflict termination. We test the argument by distinguishing two distinct diffusion patterns of battles: distant and proximate. The empirical results reveal that distant diffusion, but not proximate diffusion, of battles makes civil conflicts less likely to terminate. The analysis also demonstrates that incorporating diffusion dynamics significantly improves our ability to predict conflict termination.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 2 |
ID:
167278
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
Previous studies on natural resources and civil wars find that the presence of natural resources increases both civil conflict risk and duration. At the same time, belligerents often cooperate over resource extraction, suggesting a temporal variation in the contest over this subnational space. This study argues that parties fight over natural resources primarily when they expect that the conflict is about to end, as the importance of controlling them increases in the post-conflict setting. In contrast, belligerents that anticipate a long war have incentives to avoid fighting near natural resources since excessive violence will hurt the extraction, trade, and subsequent taxation that provide conflict actors with income from the resource. We test our argument using yearly and monthly grid-cell-level data on African civil conflicts for the period 1989–2008 and find support for our expected spatial variation. Using whether negotiations are underway as an indicator about warring parties’ expectations on conflict duration, we find that areas with natural resources in general experience less intense fighting than other areas, but during negotiations these very areas witness most of the violence. We further find that the spatial shift in violence occurs immediately when negotiations are opened. A series of difference-in-difference estimations show a visible shift of violence towards areas rich in natural resources in the first three months after parties have initiated talks. Our findings are relevant for scholarship on understanding and predicting the trajectories of micro-level civil conflict violence, and for policymakers seeking to prevent peace processes being derailed.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|