The scope of political jurisdictions and violence: theory and evidence from Africa

Jordan Adamson

Public Choice, 2021, vol. 186, issue 3, No 15, 467-490

Abstract: Abstract Is there more violence in areas with many small countries or only a single large one? I build on Bernholz (The international game of power: past, present and future 1985) to create a unifying framework where both internal and external contestants engage in conflict, and then summarize how the spatial configuration of countries affects all types of violence with the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index of state sizes. Empirically, I examine fatalities from the conflict in Africa, where I use the borders set by the colonial powers of Europe to identify the effect of concentration. I find the most fatalities in areas with many small countries, but that violence decreases with concentration at a decreasing rate and eventually increases in areas with only one large country. These findings suggest an important difference between the observed average effect of concentration on violence and the expected marginal effects of further concentration.

Keywords: Geopolitical concentration; Internal violence; External violence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 H11 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11127-019-00763-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:pubcho:v:186:y:2021:i:3:d:10.1007_s11127-019-00763-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11127/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11127-019-00763-8

Access Statistics for this article

Public Choice is currently edited by WIlliam F. Shughart II

More articles in Public Choice from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().