Insurgency and Small Wars: Estimation of Unobserved Coalition Structures

Abstract

Insurgency and guerrilla warfare impose enormous socio‐economic costs and often persist for decades. The opacity of such forms of conflict is 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 militants in conflict areas. These approaches are based on daily geocoded incident‐level data on insurgent attacks. We provide applications to the Afghan conflict during the 2004–2009 period and to Pakistan during the 2008–2011 period, identifying systematically different coalition structures. Applications to global terrorism data and identification of new groups or shifting coalitions are discussed.

Stimulant or Depressant? Resource-Related Income Shocks and Conflict

“…Finally, we add to the growing literature on conflict and violence in Afghanistan (e.g., Child, 2019;Condra et al , 2018;Trebbi & Weese, 2019;Langlotz, 2021;Lyall et al , 2013). Wright (2018) argues that the tactics of rebel groups depend on their own and the state's capacity, as well as on outside options available to civilians -all potentially affected by income shocks.…”

“…Our main results and existing qualitative evidence suggest that most districts in Afghanistan do not fit the same scenario. The Afghan conflict between 2001 and 2021 was best characterized as a two-sided contest between the Taliban and pro-government forces (see Trebbi & Weese, 2019) including the internationally recognized Western-backed government, international forces, and their allies. Hence, many districts that were not controlled by pro-government forces were held In line with the predictions from our theoretical framework, we find that the conflictreducing effect of higher opium prices is the strongest in districts under Taliban control.…”

The mediation effect of radical right parties on the nexus between immigration and right-wing terrorism

“…In this paper, coding is based on the GTD, which has been widely used in the literature (e.g. Trebbi and Weese, 2019; Rigterink, 2021; Peffeley et al, 2015; Piazza, 2020). Drawing on natural language processing and other computational techniques, the GTD looked at news sources around the world and documented more than 200,000 terrorist attacks (including 95,000 bombings, 20,000 assassinations and 15,000 kidnappings and hostage events) from 1970 to 2019.…”

History dynamics of unified empire in China (770 BC to 476 BC)

“…For the history of Europe, factors of wars (territory, commerce, and navigation) can be also analysed [24], and reasons for wars also be quantitatively checked [25]. Based on daily GIS code case‐level data, alliance structures can be also identified [26]. Quantitative studies have advantages and seem to be more convincing; (d) Emerging interdisciplinary research.…”