My neighbour’s war: Spatial dependence of conflict incidence in West Africa

Mario Maggioni and Sara Balestri

No dis1903, DISEIS - Quaderni del Dipartimento di Economia internazionale, delle istituzioni e dello sviluppo from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimento di Economia internazionale, delle istituzioni e dello sviluppo (DISEIS)

Abstract: Although recent empirical literature acknowledges that organized violence tends to cluster geographically, the limited use of disaggregated data and of accurate spatial estimation techniques fail in explaining the spatial structure of conflict events. In this paper we analyse conflict incidence in West Africa through the provision of an illustrative case (the Mano River Region) by: (i) performing the analysis with the smallest possible sub-national disaggregated areas; (ii) taking into account the location of valuable resources (lootable diamonds and gold); and (iii) applying the most suitable spatial econometric specifications. Our results show the existence of relevant cross-border spillover effects of conflict events; and confirm that natural valuable resources are strong predictors of organized violence location. Moreover, we demonstrate that events concerning incompatibilities on government and/or territory are more strongly related to diamonds location, whereas events between no-state armed groups are indifferently connected to the location of both valuable resources.

JEL-codes: C21 D74 N47 N57 Q34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dipartimenti.unicatt.it/diseis-wp_1903.pdf (application/pdf)

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:dis:wpaper:dis1903

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DISEIS - Quaderni del Dipartimento di Economia internazionale, delle istituzioni e dello sviluppo from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimento di Economia internazionale, delle istituzioni e dello sviluppo (DISEIS) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emilio Colombo ().