EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

When have violent civil conflicts spread? Introducing a dataset of substate conflict contagion

Nathan Black
Additional contact information
Nathan Black: Harvard University

Journal of Peace Research, 2013, vol. 50, issue 6, 751-759

Abstract: The spread, diffusion, spillover, or contagion of violent civil conflict – including insurgencies, coups, or other internal armed conflict – across international borders is of great concern to civil war scholars and international security policymakers alike. For instance, great power military interventions are often predicated in part on the belief that if a given conflict is not stopped now, it may spread and destabilize an entire region. Nevertheless, our understanding of this phenomenon of ‘substate conflict contagion’ is hindered by the lack of a comprehensive and accurate universe of cases. In this article I introduce an original dataset of cases and non-cases of substate conflict contagion between 1946 and 2007. The key difference between my dataset and other datasets of this phenomenon is that I require in my definition of contagion not only the spatial and temporal proximity of two conflicts, but also a documented causal link between them. After introducing the dataset and the process by which it was constructed, I show that substate conflict contagion by my definition is significantly less common than previous scholarship and policymaker rhetoric suggest, and that its correlates – and potentially the best methods with which to measure those correlates – are different from prior research as well. Policy implications are considered, and applications of this dataset for future conflict research are explored.

Keywords: civil conflict; civil war; conflict contagion; conflict dataset (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022343313493634 (text/html)

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:sae:joupea:v:50:y:2013:i:6:p:751-759

DOI: 10.1177/0022343313493634

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Peace Research from Peace Research Institute Oslo
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:sae:joupea:v:50:y:2013:i:6:p:751-759