Alex Braithwaite

Resisting infection: How state capacity conditions conflict contagion

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.

Transnational Terrorism Hot Spots: Identification and Impact Evaluation:

To combat transnational terrorism, it is important to understand its geography. The extant literature on the geography of terrorism, however, is small and focuses on the distribution and diffusion of terrorism among aggregate regions such as Europe and the Middle East. In this analysis, we study transnational terrorism hot spots at the country level. We employ local spatial statistics to identify terrorism hot spot neighborhoods and countries that are located within. We also assess empirically the impact of these hot spots on future patterns of terrorist incidents. We find that countries with significant experiences with terrorism are often located within these hot spots, but that not all countries within the hot spots have experienced large numbers of terrorist incidents. We also find in a pooled time-series analysis of 112 countries from 1975 to 1997 that when a country is located within a hot spot neighborhood, a large increase in the number of terrorist attacks is likely to occur in the next period. This effect is robust under alternative definitions of geographic proximity and across the two most popular measures of local hot spots of data—the G* i statistic and the Local Morans I. These findings have important implications for the continuing fight against transnational terrorism.

TARGET CHOICE DURING EXTREME EVENTS: A DISCRETE SPATIAL CHOICE MODEL OF THE 2011 LONDON RIOTS

Riots are extreme events, and much of the early research on rioting suggested that the decision making of rioters was far from rational and could only be understood from the perspective of a collective mind. In the current study, we derive and test a set of expectations regarding rioter spatial decision making developed from theories originally intended to explain patterns of urban crime when law and order prevail—crime pattern and social disorganization theory—and consider theories of collective behavior and contagion. To do this, we use data for all riot-related incidents that occurred in London in August 2011 that were detected by the police. Unlike most studies of victimization, we use a random utility model to examine simultaneously how the features of the destinations selected by rioters, the origins of their journeys, and the characteristics of the offenders influence offender spatial decision making. The results demonstrate that rioter target choices were far from random and provide support for all three types of theory, but for crime pattern theory in particular. For example, rioters were more likely to engage in the disorder close to their home location and to select areas that contained routine activity nodes and transport hubs, and they were less likely to cross the Thames River. In terms of contagion, rioters were found to be more likely to target areas that had experienced rioting in the previous 24 hours. From a policy perspective, the findings provide insight into the types of areas that may be most vulnerable during riots and why this is the case, and when particular areas are likely to be at an elevated risk of this type of disorder.

Autocratic Institutions and Civil Conflict Contagion

We offer an account of civil conflict contagion in which we argue that in peaceful neighborhoods autocracies that provide an opportunity for legal participation in domestic politics—via elected legislatures—are able to offset violent demands for change from domestic opposition groups. We add, however, the expectation that these openings in the political institutions of the country are insufficient to appease renewed opposition demands in autocracies located in conflict-ridden neighborhoods. We suggest that this is because of the threat of externalities from nearby conflicts, as well as the likelihood that domestic opposition groups will emulate violent examples set overseas. Thus, conflict contagion affects autocracies with legislatures that reside in neighborhoods with ongoing civil conflicts. We test this claim via multivariate probit analyses in which conflict onset is a function of institutional design at the country level and conflict within the neighborhood. These analyses offer support for our test...

MIDLOC: Introducing the Militarized Interstate Dispute Location dataset

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.

Ballots, Bargains, and Bombs: Terrorist Targeting of Spoiler Opportunities

Benjamin Netanyahus come-from-behind victory over Shimon Peres in the Israeli national elections of May 1996, following an apparent intensification of Palestinian terrorism over the course of that spring, reminded observers of the political ramifications of terrorism. Since May 1996 was also the month in which Israel reentered Final Status negotiations with a Palestinian delegation in Taba, Egypt, the timing of this surge in violence encourages us to ask if terrorists regularly conceive of elections and rounds of negotiations as “spoiler opportunities,” or opportune times to undermine peaceful political processes. We address this question in the context of Israels long‐running experience with elections, negotiations, and terrorism. We hypothesize that attacks resulting in fatalities are likely to increase in periods immediately surrounding Israeli general elections and key rounds of negotiations affecting the fate of the Palestinian population. Negative binomial event count analyses of the period 1970–2007 suggest that violent opponents indeed viewed the periods preceding negotiations and the ends of electoral cycles as “spoiler opportunities.”

The Battle for Baghdad: Testing Hypotheses About Insurgency From Risk Heterogeneity, Repeat Victimization, and Denial Policing Approaches

The Iraqi Insurgency (2003–2011) has commonly been characterized as demonstrating the tendency for violence to cluster and diffuse at the local level. Recent research has demonstrated that insurgent attacks in Iraq cluster in time and space in a manner similar to that observed for the spread of a disease. The current study employs a variety of approaches common to the scientific study of criminal activities to advance our understanding of the correlates of observed patterns of the incidence and contagion of insurgent attacks. We hypothesize that the precise patterns will vary from one place to another, but that more attacks will occur in areas that are heavily populated, where coalition forces are active, and along road networks. To test these hypotheses, we use a fishnet to build a geographical model of Baghdad that disaggregates the city into more than 3000 grid cell locations. A number of logistic regression models with spatial and temporal lags are employed to explore patterns of local escalation and diffusion. These models demonstrate the validity of arguments under each of three models but suggest, overall, that risk heterogeneity arguments provide the most compelling and consistent account of the location of insurgency. In particular, the results demonstrate that violence is most likely at locations with greater population levels, higher density of roads, and military garrisons.

The conditioning effect of protest history on the emulation of nonviolent conflict

Violent domestic conflicts spread between countries via spillover effects and the desire to emulate events abroad. Herein, we extend this emulation logic to the potential for the contagion of nonviolent conflicts. The spread of predominantly nonviolent pro-democracy mobilizations across the globe in the mid-to-late 1980s, the wave of protests in former Soviet states during the Color revolutions in the 2000s, and the eruption of nonviolent movements across the Middle East and North Africa during the Arab Spring in the early 2010s each suggest that the observation of collective action abroad encourages a desire to emulate among potential challengers to domestic autocrats. However, the need to emulate varies. Potential challengers with a recent history of protest at home are less dependent (than are those without similar experience) upon foreign exemplars to mobilize the participants and generate the resources required to make emulation practicable. By contrast, where the domestic experience of protest is absent, opposition movements are more reliant upon emulation of foreign exemplars. We test the implications of this logic using a series of multivariate logistic regression analyses. Our tests employ data on nonviolent civil resistance mobilizations that occurred across the global population of autocratic states between 1946 and 2006. These tests, along with post-estimation analysis, provide evidence consistent with our conditional logic of emulation.

Dangerous neighbours, regional territorial conflict and the democratic peace

The likelihood of conflict and the observation of joint democracy tend to cluster regionally. This article tests the argument that these clusters can be explained by regional variations in the stability of international borders using a new dataset of territorial dispute hot spots from 1960–1998. These hot spots identify spatial and temporal correlations in the territorial dispute data and therefore serve as close proxies for regional or neighbourhood instability. The addition of these hot spots also eliminates a common form of omitted variable bias – the spatial clustering of conflict – in international conflict models. These results confirm that joint democracy is only statistically significant as a predictor of fatal militarized interstate disputes in more peaceful neighbourhoods once territorial hot spots are jointly estimated. The interaction between joint democracy and regional instability confirms that the effects of regime type on continued conflict apply mostly to dyads in peaceful regions.

Does poverty cause conflict? Isolating the causal origins of the conflict trap

Does poverty cause civil conflict? A considerable literature seeks to answer this question, yet concerns about reverse causality threaten the validity of extant conclusions. To estimate the impact of poverty on conflict and to determine whether the relationship between them is causal, it is necessary to identify a source of exogenous variation in poverty. We do this by introducing a robust instrument for poverty: a time-varying measure of international inequalities. We draw upon existing theories about the structural position of a country in the international economic network—specifically, the expectation that countries in the core tend to be wealthier and those on the periphery struggle to develop. This instrument is plausibly exogenous and satisfies the exclusion restriction, which suggests that it affects conflict only through its influence upon poverty. Instrumental variables probit regression is employed to demonstrate that the impact of poverty upon conflict appears to be causal.