The geography of armed civil conflict

This document seeks to examine the origins and dynamics of civil war by exploring the many possible functions of geography. Overall the paper tries to widen the understanding of geographic aspects of armed conflict, where issues of location relative to the state center, neighbor countries, and other conflicts, as well as the scope of the conflict zone have been of particular interest. On another level the paper seeks to enable the researcher to consider the spatial association between factors of interest and to assess characteristics of the conflicts (as opposed to the conflict-ridden countries).

According to the paper the single most important finding is that the type of conflict matters. This is because models of territorial conflict perform substantially better than governmental conflict models. Territorial conflicts are to a greater extent shaped by structural and contextual factors that can be measured across countries and over time.

Another significant finding is the influential role that location has to play. The paper demonstrates that the distance to the center of state power is a strong determinant of risk, type, duration, and indirectly also diffusion of conflict. Displeased groups in remote parts of the country are likely to see secessionism as a more viable strategy to redress their grievance than attempting to topple the regime. Moreover, the paper argues that in fact areas along the country boundaries are more at risk of civil war.

Lastly the paper provides some recommendation and suggestions for future research: - collect better disaggregated data on factors commonly assumed to influence the risk and dynamics of armed conflict;- geographic distribution of ethnic groups should be considered top priority;- economic and social inequalities need to be measured below the scale of the country;- there needs to be more gathering and analysing of data on the location and spread of refugees;- the conflict data also need to be improved in order to better capture the spatiotemporal dynamics of individual conflict zones.