Geographic determinants of indiscriminate violence in civil wars

Sebastian Schutte

Conflict Management and Peace Science, 2017, vol. 34, issue 4, 380-405

Abstract: What determines the type of violence used by military actors in civil wars? Drawing on Kalyvas’s “information problem†and Boulding’s “loss of strength gradient†, this paper proposes a simple model of how the violence becomes more indiscriminate as a function of distance from the actors’ power centers. The proposed mechanism is a growing inability of the actors to distinguish between collaborators of the adversary and innocent bystanders. Tested on the conflict event level for 11 cases of insurgency, the results indicate that a simple distance-decay mechanism can explain the occurrence of indiscriminate violence to a large extent.

Keywords: Afghanistan; civil war; conflict events; GIS; indiscriminate violence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:compsc:v:34:y:2017:i:4:p:380-405

DOI: 10.1177/0738894215593690

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