arts Article Disentangling Strategic and Opportunistic Looting: The Relationship between Antiquities Looting and Armed Conflict in Egypt Michelle D. Fabiani ID Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA;
[email protected]; Tel.: +1-301-405-4733 Received: 30 March 2018; Accepted: 11 June 2018; Published: 14 June 2018 Abstract: Antiquities are looted from archaeological sites across the world, seemingly more often in areas of armed conflict. While this is not the only context in which antiquities are looted, it is an important context and one for which much is still unknown. Previously, the relationship between antiquities looting and armed conflict has been assessed with qualitative case studies and journalistic evidence due to a lack of systematically collected data. This study considers the relationship between antiquities looting and armed conflict in Egypt from 1997 to 2014 with a newly collected time series dataset. Autoregressive Distributed Lag Models (ARDL) with a bounds testing approach are used to assess both the overall relationship between these two phenomena and their temporal ordering. This article finds that antiquities looting and armed conflict are, indeed, statistically related; and that antiquities looting more often precedes armed conflict rather than the other way around. This finding suggests that looting is more strategic than opportunistic. Implications and future directions are discussed. Keywords: antiquities looting; Egypt; armed conflict; strategic looting; opportunistic looting; open source data; ARDL 1. Introduction Antiquities looting has become increasingly prominent in news headlines. Newspapers around the world show headlines reporting antiquities looting from Israel, Cambodia, China, Greece, Italy, Egypt, Peru, Syria, and the United States.