Kristian Skrede Gleditsch

Refugees and the Spread of Civil War

Certain regions of the world experience more conflict than others. Previous analyses have shown that a civil war in one country significantly increases the likelihood that neighboring states will experience conflict. This finding, however, still remains largely unexplained. We argue that population movements are an important mechanism by which conflict spreads across regions. Refugee flows are not only the consequence of political turmoil—the presence of refugees and displaced populations can also increase the risk of subsequent conflict in host and origin countries. Refugees expand rebel social networks and constitute a negative externality of civil war. Although the vast majority of refugees never directly engage in violence, refugee flows may facilitate the transnational spread of arms, combatants, and ideologies conducive to conflict; they alter the ethnic composition of the state; and they can exacerbate economic competition. We conduct an empirical analysis of the link between refugees and civil conflict since the mid-twentieth century, and we find that the presence of refugees from neighboring countries leads to an increased probability of violence, suggesting that refugees are one important source of conflict diffusion.We would like to thank the participants in the “Resources, Governance Structures, and Civil War†Workshop at the European Consortium for Political Research in Uppsala, Sweden, 13–18 April 2004, for early feedback on previous versions of this article. We would also like to thank Anis Bajrektarevic, Lars-Erik Cederman, David Cunningham, Kristian Berg Harpviken, BA©la Hovy, Sarah Lischer, Monty Marshall, Erik Melander, Will H. Moore, Magnus A–berg, and Michael Ward for providing us with data and helpful comments, as well as Jan Ketil RA¸d for permission to reproduce the map from the program ViewConflicts in Figure 1. Finally, we are grateful for the comments and suggestions of the editors of International Organization and the anonymous reviewers. This research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES-0351670).

Diffusion and the International Context of Democratization

Democracy does not evolve sui generis+ The spatial clustering in democ- racy and transitions suggests that international factors play a prominent role in forg- ing democracies as well as influencing their durability+ We argue that democracy often comes about as a result of changes in the relative power of important actors and groups as well as their evaluations of particular institutions, both of which are often influenced by forces outside the country in question+ The scope and extent of con- nections with other democratic countries in a region can strengthen support for dem- ocratic reform and help sustain institutions in transitional democracies+ Results from a transition model demonstrate that international factors can exert a strong influence on the prospects for transitions to democracy, and the spatial clustering in democ- racy and transitions cannot adequately be explained by the hypothesized domestic social requisites of individual countries+

Introducing Archigos: A Dataset of Political Leaders

Scholars for a long time theorized about the role of political leaders, but empirical research has been limited by the lack of systematic data about individual leaders. Archigos is a new dataset with information on leaders in 188 countries from 1875 to 2004. We provide an overview of the main features of this data. Archigos specifically identifies the effective leaders of each independent state; it codes when and how leaders came into power, their age, and their gender, as well as their personal fate one year after they lost office. We illustrate the utility of the Archigos dataset by demonstrating how leader attributes predict other features of interest in International Relations and Comparative Politics. Crisis interactions differ depending on whether leaders face each other for the first time or have had prior interactions. Irregular leader changes can help identify political change in autocracies not apparent from data that consider only the democratic nature of institutions. Finally, transitions to democracy in the third wave are more likely to fail in instances where autocratic rulers were punished after leaving office. Our examples illustrate new empirical findings that simply could not be explored in existing data sources. Although selective, our overview demonstrates how Archigos bears considerable promise in providing answers to new and old research questions and opens up new avenues for research on individual leaders as decisionmakers.

It Takes Two A Dyadic Analysis of Civil War Duration and Outcome

Theories of conflict emphasize dyadic interaction, yet existing empirical studies of civil war focus largely on state attributes and pay little attention to nonstate antagonists. We recast civil war in a dyadic perspective, and consider how nonstate actor attributes and their relationship to the state influence conflict dynamics. We argue that strong rebels, who pose a military challenge to the government, are likely to lead to short wars and concessions. Conflicts where rebels seem weak can become prolonged if rebels can operate in the periphery so as to defy a government victory yet are not strong enough to extract concessions. Conflicts should be shorter when potential insurgents can rely on alternative political means to violence. We examine these hypotheses in a dyadic analysis of civil war duration and outcomes, using new data on nonstate actors and conflict attributes, finding support for many of our conjectures.

Horizontal Inequalities and Ethnonationalist Civil War: A Global Comparison

Contemporary research on civil war has largely dismissed the role of political and economic grievances, focusing instead on opportunities for conflict. However, these strong claims rest on questionable theoretical and empirical grounds. Whereas scholars have examined primarily the relationship between individual inequality and conflict, we argue that horizontal inequalities between politically relevant ethnic groups and states at large can promote ethnonationalist conflict. Extending the empirical scope to the entire world, this article introduces a new spatial method that combines our newly geocoded data on ethnic groups’ settlement areas with spatial wealth estimates. Based on these methodological advances, we find that, in highly unequal societies, both rich and poor groups fight more often than those groups whose wealth lies closer to the country average. Our results remain robust to a number of alternative sample definitions and specifications.

Spatial regression models

Preface Chapter 1: Introduction Interaction and Social Science Democracy Around the World Introducing Spatial Dependence Maps as Visual Displays of Data Measuring Spatial Association and Correlation Measuring Proximity Estimating Spatial Models Summary Chapter 2: Spatially Lagged Dependent Variables Regression with Spatially Lagged Dependent Variables Estimating the Spatially Lagged y Model Maximum Likelihood Estimates of the Spatially Lagged Y Model of Democracy Equilibrium Effects in the Spatially Lagged y Model Spatial Dependence in Turnout in Italy Using Different Weights Matrices in a Spatially Lagged Dependent Variable Model The Spatially Lagged Dependent Variable Versus OLS with Dummy Variables Summary Chapter 3: Spatial Error Model The Spatial Error Model Maximum Likelihood Estimation of the Spatial Errors Model Example: Democracy and Development Spatially Lagged y Versus Spatial Errors Assessing Spatial Error in Dyadic Trade Flows Summary Chapter 4: Extensions Specifying Connectivities Inference and Model Evaluation Summary Appendix: Software Options References

Double Take A Reexamination of Democracy and Autocracy in Modern Polities

The Polity data are widely used to explore the causes and consequences of democratic authority patterns. These data often have been used uncritically. The authors explore some of the theoretical and empirical characteristics of these data. They show how the analytical composition of the well-known democracy and autocracy scores is not upheld by an empirical analysis of the component measurements and demonstrate that democracy, as measured by the Polity indicators, is fundamentally a reflection of decisional constraints on the chief executive. The recruitment and participation dimensions are shown to be empirically extraneous despite their centrality in democratic theory. The authors conclude that it is a mistake to overlook the categorical nature of these data and that an analysis of the constituent authority patterns is likely to be fruitful for the democratic peace and democratization literature.

The Diffusion of Democracy, 1946–1994

We examine the relationship between the temporal and spatial aspects of democratic diffusion in the world system since 1946. We find strong and consistent evidence of temporal clustering of democratic and autocratic trends, as well as strong spatial association (or autocorrelation) of democratization. The analysis uses an exploratory data approach in a longitudinal framework to understand global and regional trends in changes in authority structures. Our work reveals discrete changes in regimes that run counter to the dominant aggregate trends of democratic waves or sequences, demonstrating how the ebb and flow of democracy varies among the worlds regions. We conclude that further analysis of the process of regime change from autocracy to democracy, as well as reversals, should start from a “domain-specific” position that dis-aggregates the globe into its regional mosaics.

On the Frequency of Severe Terrorist Events

In the spirit of Lewis Richardson’s original study of the statistics of deadly conflicts, we study the frequency and severity of terrorist attacks worldwide since 1968. We show that these events are uniformly characterized by the phenomenon of “scale invariance,” that is, the frequency scales as an inverse power of the severity, P(x) Αx-α. We find that this property is a robust feature of terrorism, persisting when we control for economic development of the target country, the type of weapon used, and even for short time scales. Further, we show that the center of the distribution oscillates slightly with a period of roughly τ≈ 13 years, that there exist significant temporal correlations in the frequency of severe events, and that current models of event incidence cannot account for these variations or the scale invariance property of global terrorism. Finally, we describe a simple toy model for the generation of these statistics and briefly discuss its implications.

Measuring Space: A Minimum-Distance Database and Applications to International Studies

In this overview of a new database and approach to measuring distance among historical and contemporary independent nation-states, we review the utility of space to theory and empirical research in international studies. We identify weaknesses in existing empirical data on distances and contiguity among nations. Categorical data on distance treat proximity as an either-or issue and do not permit identifying degree of proximity among states. Continuous measures of distances between midpoints, such as capital cities, often overstate the actual distances between state borders and suffer for large states and irregular territories. We outline a new alternative approach, based on measuring the minimum distance for pairs of polities in the international system, which remedies some of these shortcomings. The current implementation of the minimum-distance database includes the minimum distances for all polities within 950 km of each other from 1875 to the present. We demonstrate the enhanced flexibility of the new minimum-distance approach relative to existing alternatives. Moreover, we illustrate how variables constructed from distance measures, combined with spatial statistical techniques, can contribute substantively to international relations and cross-national comparative research. We demonstrate the importance of dependence among geographical neighbors by examining the link between levels of economic wealth and prospects for democracy in the context of regional interdependence among states.