Insurgency and Small Wars: Estimation of Unobserved Coalition Structures

Francesco Trebbi and Eric Weese

Working Papers from Economic Growth Center, Yale University

Abstract: Insurgency and guerrilla warfare impose enormous socio-economic costs and often persist for decades. The opacity of such forms of con flict is often an obstacle to effective international humanitarian intervention and development programs. To shed light on the internal organization of otherwise unknown insurgent groups, this paper proposes two methodologies for the detection of unobserved coalitions of militant factions in con ict areas, and studies their main determinants. Our approach is parsimonious and based on daily geocoded incident-level data on insurgent attacks alone. We provide applications to the Afghan con ict during the 2004-2009 period and to Pakistan during the 2008-2011 period, identifying systematically different coalition structures. Further applications are discussed.

Keywords: coalition formation; mixed integer programming; moment inequalities; municipal mergers; myopic deviations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C63 D71 H77 R53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 79 pages
Date: 2016-05
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://egcenter.economics.yale.edu/sites/default/f ... -cdp1100/cdp1053.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Insurgency and Small Wars: Estimation of Unobserved Coalition Structures (2019)
Working Paper: Insurgency and small Wars: Estimation of Unobserved Coalition Structures (2016)
Working Paper: Insurgency and Small Wars: Estimation of Unobserved Coalition Structures (2016)
Working Paper: Insurgency and Small Wars: Estimation of Unobserved Coalition Structures (2015)
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:egc:wpaper:1053

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Economic Growth Center, Yale University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Benjamin King ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).