The collapse of Mobutu's Zaire and the arrival of father and son Kabila regimes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (hereafter, the DRC) were hastened by the dramatic and tumultuous spread of violence from neighboring Rwanda. Mobutu's state's inability to manage the influx of Hutu refugees (with Interahamwe militia members interspersed) into the Kivu province of eastern Zaire from Rwanda's bloody genocide of 1994 or to compensate for the ratcheting up of their cross-border skirmishes with the Banyamulenge (Zairean Tutsi) population in 1996, exacerbated extant tensions and has since resulted in more than a dozen years of civil war. This example prompts us to ask: are countries with higher levels of state capacity better able to resist the spread of violence from neighboring territories into their own? The author argues that when falsely divided notions of spatial heterogeneity and dependence are interacted, contagion from neighboring conflicts becomes a risk of diminishing value for increasingly capable states. A model of civil war contagion affirms a conditional hypothesis, showing that state capacity modifies the likelihood that a state will become infected by a civil conflict occurring in neighboring territories.

No abstract

To combat transnational terrorism, it is important to understand its geography. The extant literature on the geography of terrorism, however, is small and focuses on the distribution and diffusion of terrorism among aggregate regions such as Europe and the Middle East. In this analysis, we study transnational terrorism hot spots at the country level. We employ local spatial statistics to identify terrorism hot spot neighborhoods and countries that are located within. We also assess empirically the impact of these hot spots on future patterns of terrorist incidents. We find that countries with significant experiences with terrorism are often located within these hot spots, but that not all countries within the hot spots have experienced large numbers of terrorist incidents. We also find in a pooled time-series analysis of 112 countries from 1975 to 1997 that when a country is located within a hot spot neighborhood, a large increase in the number of terrorist attacks is likely to occur in the next period. This effect is robust under alternative definitions of geographic proximity and across the two most popular measures of local hot spots of data—the G*i statistic and the Local Moran's I. These findings have important implications for the continuing fight against transnational terrorism.

No abstract

No abstract