Geography of Civil War- Descriptive Statistics

Kailash Srinivasan
March 17, 2014
Geographical factors play a crucial role in determining how a civil war is fought and
who will prevail. Halvard Buhaug and Scott Gates (2002) seek to analyze the role of
distance from capital plays in the goals of a rebellion. They argue that rebels that hold
secessionist goals tend to ght farther away from the capital whereas those which seek
the reins of power will ght closer to the capital city. The unit of analysis is armed
civil conicts dened by the PRIO/Uppsala Armed Conict data set. Buhaug and Gates
modify, however, the dataset by merging subconicts if they consisted of identical actors,
incompatibility and geographical location and if less than three years passed from one
conict unit to another. The dataset includes 265 civil conicts fromthe years 1946-2000.
Buhaug and Gates contribute variables representing the location and scope of conict to
the data set.
Location represents the distance a rebellion has from the capital city. In conicts
that are restricted to one specic place- city or administrative region- the conicts were
given center points equaling the geographic coordinates of the specic place. Larger
battleelds were assigned points by looking at the major battle zones and areas controlled
by rebel groups. The conict center is the midpoint of these locations. Values estimated
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the conict-capital distances between 0 (the capital is the center of conict) and 3,360
(from West Papua to Jakarta).
The scope of the conict was calculated two ways. The absolute scope represents the
overall area of the conict zone and the relative scope refers to the conict area as a
proportion of the total land area of the country. Conict zones are dened as circular
areas centered around the conict center point. The radius of the conict zone equals the
distances from the center to the most distant battle zone rounded up to the nearest 50
kilometer interval. The lower-bound value is 50 kilometeres for conicts that look place
within a single city.
Buhaug and Gates construct the hypothesis that rebel groups that aim to seize power
from the state will tend to ght their wars closer to the capital than those with seces-
sionist aims. In order to see what determines the scope of a conict, they utilize a set
of explanatory variables regarding physical geographical factors as well as social factors
related to conict such as duration of the conict and the emplacement of an interna-
tional border or not. Identity-based eects are controlled for by constructing a dummy
variable which takes the value of 1 if rebels are dierent ethnic or religious group and 0 if
co-ethnics or co-confessionaries. The main source for this variable comes from Sambanis
(2000) and volumes of Keesings Record of World Events. 59% of conicts are found to
be related to identity.
The rst explanatory variables are the incompatibility variable indicating whether se-
cession or state power is the friction between rebels and the government. 40% of conicts
regard territorial distributes. 35% of conicts over power were, however, between dier-
ent identity groups. The second explanatory variable regards the duration of the conict.
All conicts were ascribed a start- and end-year. Conicts in remote areas which typi-
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cally provide hideouts in forests, mountains or international boundaries are expected to
endure longer than conicts which are more urban which is shown in the correlations
between forests, mountains and border with our duration variable. Buhaug and Gates
control for rebels hiding beyond national borders or conicts that involve neighboring
territory by constructing a dummy indicator (border) on whether or not the conict zone
is adjacent to an international border. 51% of conicts in the sample extend to or across
the national border of a conict-ridden country. The furthermore a dichotomous variable
regarding primary commodities (resource) indicating whether the conict zone contains
essential natural resources such as minerals or diamonds. The variable was constructed
by looking at the scope of the internal conict with maps on resource distribution. Data
on country area (area) and forests (forest) were drawn from World Bank data. The forest
variable gives the proportion of land area covered by forest varying between 0%and 96%.
Measures for mountainous terrain (mountain) vary between 0% and 94%.
There is an unsurprisingly high correlation between the location of the conict and
the absolute scope of the conict. It stands to reason that, as area gets bigger, so too does
the distance of conict center to the capital. It is also unsurprising that there is such little
correlation between location and the relative scope of conict because they are assumed
to increase with each other at a xed interval. It also tends to be positively correlated
with the duration of conict indicating that the farther away from the heart of a rebellion
is the capital city, then the duration of conict will be longer (r = .151). Location is, how-
ever, insignicantly correlated with physical geographical factors indicating that social
factors have a greater say than the tactical capabilities aorded by terrain that aects the
distance to capital. This would strengthen the hypothesis that it the goals and aims of
a secessionist group which determine the location to conict. Interestingly, the incom-
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patibility variable negatively correlates with location, absolute scope and land area. This
indicates that, as conicts tend toward being about territorial secession, the distance to
capital signicantly decreases (r= .534) and conicts which are about secession tend to be
in smaller countries (r = .08). Although the value is negative in terms of absolute scope,
there is a high positive correlation between incompatibility and the relative scope of a
conict. This indicates that as the relative size of a conict area increases, this indicates
secessionist aims. The dierent signs indicate that smaller countries tend toward seces-
sionist conict but, within a territory, secessionists tend to generalize conicts on as far a
distance as they can.
The absolute scope of conict is signicantly positively correlated (r = .222) with iden-
tity. This indicates that dierent ethnic or confessional groups tend to ght their battles
over a larger area which is tied to their goal of secession or state power- the correlation
between identity and incompatibility is negative .607. indicating that dierent back-
grounds tend toward secessionist conicts. These values tend to decrease but still remain
signicant when measuring based on relative size of conict. Whereas there is a negative
correlation between absolute size of conict area and secession, as the relative size of a
battleeld, then, conicts tend to be more about seizure of state power. The dierent
signed correlations are related to the size of a country. The smaller county tends toward
secessionist conict whereas larger states tend toward conicts over state power.
Table 1: Frequency Table
Location Absolute Scope Relative Scope Land Area Identity Incompatibility Duration Border Resource Mountain
Absolute Scope .587
Relative Scope .035 .489
Land Area .516 .444 -.447
Identity .524 .222 -.071 .248
Incompatibility -534 -.08 .279 -.258 -.607
Duration .151 .261 .193 .059 .18 -.165
Border .318 .334 .19 .116 .278 -.262 .282
Resource .129 .274 .123 .141 .041 .155 -.042 .011
Mountain -.035 -.019 .033 -.067 .029 -.064 .06 .081 -.324
Forest .111 .09 .002 .086 -.094 .019 .011 -.136 .121 -.127
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Bibliography
Buhaug, Halvard and Scott Gates. Geography of Civil War. Journal of Peace Re-
search. 39(4) 2002. pp. 417-433
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