Steven M. Radil

Spatial Regression Models in Criminology: Modeling Social Processes in the Spatial Weights Matrix

A decade ago, Jacqueline Cohen and George Tita served as guest editors for a special volume of the Journal of Quantitative Criminology (Vol 15, #4, 1999) that was dedicated to the study of the diffusion of homicide. In their Editor’s Introduction (Cohen and Tita 1999a), they concluded that the results presented in special volume,1 along with recent work by Morenoff and Sampson (1997), clearly demonstrated that the observed patterns of violence were consistent with patterns one might expect if violence does, in fact, diffuse over space. That is, levels of violence are not randomly distributed; instead, similar rates of violence cluster together in space (i.e., violence exhibits positive spatial autocorrelation.) Furthermore, a growing number of studies began to demonstrate that even after controlling for the ecological features known to be associated with high levels of crime (e.g., poverty, population density, male joblessness, female-headed households, etc), the clustering of high values could not be explained away. These early spatial studies of diffusion helped to establish the existence of an unobserved “neighborhood effect” that seemed to be responsible for spatially concentrated high-crime areas.

Exiles and Arms: The Territorial Practices of State Making and War Diffusion in Post–Cold War Africa

Abstract The end of the Cold War resulted in a wave of political change among post-colonial states in Africa. Following these political transformations was nearly two decades of war in central Africa (the so-called Africas World War). Building on a notion of effective sovereignty regimes, or the relationships between central state authority and state territoriality, this paper examines the territorial strategies and practices associated with the transitions to multiparty politics that enabled the space/time spread of war in the region. The attempts of existing regimes to create polities capable of returning them to power through elections gave rise to territorial practices focused on supporting exile and refugee groups that actively undermined the sovereignty of neighboring states. These territorial practices, with their roots in the democratization of single-party states, directly contributed to nearly two decades of war and human suffering in the region, while ending the wars required altogether new territorial forms of cooperation between states. This example illustrates the diverse territorial practices of states and extends the idea of sovereignty regimes by showing the implications involved in the attempts to change the forms of effective sovereignty in certain geopolitical contexts.

Geographies of U.S. Police Militarization and the Role of the 1033 Program

Concerns about police militarization have become an important public policy issue since the aggressive police response to the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, where police officers used military-style equipment to confront protestors. This event was a stark visual reminder that many U.S. police departments have used federal programs to acquire surplus military equipment, including weapons, armored vehicles, and body armor. We explore the geographies and histories of one the most important programs, called 1033, which supplies police with military equipment under the rationale of prosecuting the War on Drugs. We show that the legal blurring of the police and the military has been ongoing for decades at the national scale but this has resulted in an uneven landscape of police militarization at the county scale. We also investigate one of the most common global arguments for why police become militarized, which is the presence of Special Weapons and Tactics-style paramilitary teams, finding little support for that claim. More geographic inquiry is needed to understand the trajectories, causes, and consequences of police militarization.

A Relational Geography of War: Actor–Context Interaction and the Spread of World War I

Claims by geographers that the geopolitical context of international politics matters requires that context be defined and operationalized in a way that enables analyses illustrating that actors’ behavior varies across different contextual settings. A geographic understanding of embeddedness and relational power is meshed with a well-established contextual theory of international politics to create an operationalization of context that helps to explain the diffusion of war. Using the case of World War I, we investigate the expansion of the war from a localized political crisis in Austria–Hungary to a disastrous global scale conflict involving dozens of states. We integrate contemporary geographic thinking on context with the foundational texts of the war diffusion literature to hypothesize that war-joining behavior is explained by a political entitys relative position in a simultaneously spatial and social network context. Using social network analysis-based methodologies to develop measures of context and evaluate our hypothesis, we find that context had an important impact on states’ war-joining behavior during World War I. An understanding of context that fuses simultaneous embeddedness in network and geographic space with relational power and the methodology of blockmodeling can be used to explore the diffusion of other wars and even other phenomena across geographically situated actors.

Public Participatory GIS and the Geography of Inclusion

Public participatory geographic information systems (PPGIS) have been advanced as a means to include those who have been traditionally excluded from numerous place-specific governance activities, including planning and policymaking and as a way to resolve some of the long-standing tensions between critical traditions in human geography and the ever-expanding field of GIS. Despite the rapid adoption of participatory GIS by academics, government officials, and planning professionals, there are few guidelines of best practices for PPGIS researchers and practitioners to draw on and little effort has been made to understand how and in what ways PPGIS efforts are (or perhaps are not) effective. This article contributes to these important debates by evaluating the geography of participation in a recent participatory planning project undertaken in Muncie, Indiana. Using the mapped information that was generated from a series of public meetings, we have identified the presence of significant spatial bias in the process of participation that affected the resulting plan. This was an unexamined source of bias during this process and an example of why any emerging conversations about the best practices for PPGIS must include a consideration of the geography of participation.

A People’s Atlas of Muncie: Citizen Representations of Urban Space

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are an essential tool for analyzing and representing spatial information. The integration of GIS with qualitative research techniques can create new ways to represent data with multiple meanings incorporated, and drive change in communities and social actions. This project used mental mapping as a tool to collect data and insight from community members around Muncie, Indiana, and to introduce students to a different way of collecting data. By using these methods, students were able to get a better understanding of valuable research tools while collecting necessary data for the Muncie neighborhoods base future plans.

The Territorial Contours of Terrorism: A Conceptual Model of Territory for Non-state Violence

ABSTRACT Our article challenges a common discourse that terrorist groups are relatively disinterested in territory by exploring emerging theories about territory and territoriality. We use these theories to introduce a new conceptual model of the importance of territory for terrorism that contrasts a group’s Sovereignty Claims over Territory (SCOT), which corresponds with the ultimate territorial aims of the group, with its Effective Control of Territory (ECOT), which relates to the ability of an organization to exert influence over a particular territory. Contrasting these dimensions of territory allows us to develop several archetypes of territorially-motivated terrorism. Our model predicts that, in contrast to common deterritorial discourses, truly non-territorial terrorism is likely to be quite rare as most groups engaged in violence have territorial ambitions in one way or another. We then use our model to interrogate the salience of territory to three representative cases: the Islamic State, ETA, and FARC-EP. Our analysis shows that territory remains a central motivating factor for these groups as their overall territorial aims tend to remain constant whereas their ability to control territory is more susceptible to change. We conclude by discussing the implications of our model and analysis for future research.Our article challenges a common discourse that terrorist groups are relatively disinterested in territory by exploring emerging theories about territory and territoriality. We use these theories to...

A Tale of Two Audacities: A Response to Verweijen and van Meeteren

Abstract In this essay, we respond to the critique [see Verweijen J. and van Meeteren M. (2014) Social network analysis and the de facto/de jure conundrum: the case of security alliances and the territorialization of state authority in the post-Cold War Great Lakes region, Territory, Politics, Governance 3(1), xx–xx] of a previous paper of ours published in this journal [Radil S. M. and Flint C. (2013) Exiles and arms: the territorial practices of state making and war diffusion in post-Cold War Africa, Territory, Politics, Governance 1(2), 183–202] that used social network analysis to examine regional patterns of conflict and cooperation in the Great Lakes region of Africa. In our response we address Verweijen and van Meeterens specific critiques of our research methods and data and suggest that such critiques arise not from a concern about rigorous research methods but from different viewpoints within larger epistemological debates in social science. We discuss the contradictions embedded in their critiques, focusing on the implications of the current dominance of postmodern epistemology within the research communities relevant to our original paper.

Geographies of Cosmic War: Comparing Secular and Religious Terrorism in Space and Time

Following the September 11, 2001 attacks in the U.S., the agenda of social scientists with interest in international security issues has become dominated by religiously-motivated terrorism. This scholarship often emphasizes the claims that religious terrorists are fighting what they perceive as a “cosmic war” of good against evil and that these groups have no interest in potential negotiation with secular authorities as they aim to commit massive acts of violence that will usher in a period of final judgment for humankind. We investigate the geography of religious terrorism as a form of geopolitical agency to critically engage whether religious terrorism involves new representations of old political motivations or whether new geographies of violence are actually emerging. We theorize that a geographic form of terrorism that is consistent with the rhetoric of cosmic war may be more violent, more urban, and less focused on historically-disputed territory or on places that represent centralized state authority. Through a case study of terroristic violence in India, we found little that is consistent with this theory. Instead, we found that religious terrorism was no more violent than it had been previously, although it became more rural while also remaining concentrated in disputed areas. These practices provide no indication of the pursuit of a religiously-motivated cosmic war. Rather, we see the rhetoric as a form of geopolitical representation that connects the use of violence against civilians or non-combatants to larger struggles of good versus evil. A rush to find something new about terrorism after the attacks of September 11 has contributed to an imbalanced understanding that has overly emphasized religious themes in geopolitical representations. A more sensible approach considers geopolitical practices as well. Doing so can clarify what is fundamentally new the next time terrorism seems to reshape international security.