Globalization mitigates the risk of conflict caused by strategic territory

Abstract

Globalization is routinely blamed for various ills, including fueling conflict in strategic locations. To investigate whether these accusations are well founded, we have built a database to assess any given location’s strategic importance. Consistent with our game-theoretic model of strategic interaction, we find that overall fighting is more frequent in strategic locations close to maritime choke points (e.g., straits or capes), but that booming world trade openness considerably reduces the risks of conflict erupting in such strategic locations. The impact is quantitatively sizable, as moving one SD (1,100 km) closer to a choke point increases the conflict likelihood by 25% of the baseline risk in periods of low globalization, while reducing it during world trade booms. Our results have important policy implications for supranational coordination.

<div> Does Privacy Regulation Harm Content Providers?&nbsp; </div> <div> <br> </div> <div> A Longitudinal Analysis of the Impact of the GDPR </div>

“…Our empirical strategy focuses on capturing metrics correlated with websites' ability to provide new, quality content. The metrics include variables used in the previous literature, such as the amount of new content URLs generated by online publishers over time, the volume of traffic they receive, and the degree of social media engagement with new content (Shiller et al, 2018;Gallea and Rohner, 2021;Ferreira et al, 2021). In addition, we capture information such as content providers' exit from the market, and changes in revenue-and data-generating strategies, which may also signal websites' distress with the impact of the GDPR.…”

“…GDELT gathers and provides metadata for articles from news and media websites going back to 2015 from both domestic (US) and international sources. The database provides metadata including the URL, publication date, and publisher website for each article, and has been used in studies that examined global events (Gallea and Rohner, 2021;Ferreira et al, 2021). We use GDELT data to count the number of new URLs of content (GDELT URLs) published by each website in the sample in the week surrounding each wave of data collection (three days before and after each OpenWPM observation).…”

Cash and Conflict: Large-Scale Experimental Evidence from Niger

“…We draw on geo-referenced conflict-event data taken from the GDELT data set (Leetaru and Schrodt 2013). This established data source has been widely used in recent research (see, e.g., Manacorda and Tesei 2020;Armand et al 2020;Gallea and Rohner 2021;Naidu et al 2021) and draws on media and NGO reports from a wide variety of international and domestic sources, covering print, broadcast, and web outlets in over 100 languages.…”

Conflict, Civil Wars, and Human Development

“…Another type of vicious cycle fuelling persistent conflict is the fact that conflict depletes intergroup trust and trade (see discussion above) and that lower trust and trade results in a greater likelihood of future conflict (Martin et al (2008); Rohner et al (2013b); Gallea and Rohner (2021)).…”