Identifying the effect of climate variability on communal conflict through randomization

Jonas Nordkvelle, Siri Aas Rustad () and Monika Salmivalli
Additional contact information
Jonas Nordkvelle: Peace Research Institute Oslo
Siri Aas Rustad: Peace Research Institute Oslo
Monika Salmivalli: Norwegian University of Life Science

Climatic Change, 2017, vol. 141, issue 4, No 3, 627-639

Abstract: Abstract In recent years, the focus of quantitative climate-conflict research has shifted from studying civil wars to studying different types of conflicts, particularly non-state and communal conflicts, based on the argument that these local-level conflicts are a more likely consequence of climate variability than civil war. However, the findings from previous research do not paint a consistent picture of the relationship between climate and communal conflict. We posit that a research design treating the climate variable as randomized is a better and more convincing strategy for estimating the relationship between climate variability and communal conflict compared to the conventional control method to account for confounders. In this paper, we ask two questions: (1) what type of research design allows us to treat climate variability as randomized and (2) what can we say about the relationship between climate variability and communal violence using this new design? To answer these questions, we analyze six large subnational areas, at a monthly time scale, and calculate the standardized precipitation index for each area for each month. We find that both short, unusually dry intervals and long, unusually wet intervals increase the likelihood of a communal conflict event.

Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10584-017-1914-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:climat:v:141:y:2017:i:4:d:10.1007_s10584-017-1914-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-017-1914-3

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

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