Diss. Eth No. 22159 Disaggregating Civil Conflict
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DISS. ETH NO. 22159 DISAGGREGATING CIVIL CONFLICT: THEORETICAL, METHODOLOGICAL AND EMPIRICAL CONTRIBUTIONS A thesis submitted to attain the degree of DOCTOR OF SCIENCES of ETH ZURICH (Dr. sc. ETH Zurich) presented by KARSTEN DONNAY Dipl. Phys., TU München born on 11.11.1983 citizen of Germany accepted on the recommendation of Examiner: Prof. Dr. Dirk HELBING – ETH Zurich Co-Examiner: Prof. Dr. Ravi BHAVNANI – Graduate Institute Geneva Co-Examiner: Prof. Dr. Scott PAGE – University of Michigan 2014 Acknowledgements This PhD thesis could not have been written without the support of many people. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my advisor Dirk Helbing for his guidance throughout the past years. I am especially thankful to Dirk for creating an environment that allowed me to pursue risky, long-term projects. Without his unwavering support throughout, these projects would not have been possible. I am also deeply indebted to Ravi Bhavnani who as a co-advisor and collaborator has decisively influenced and supported all aspects of this dissertation. It has been a pleasure to work closely with Ravi, the intellectual stimulation, guidance and support he has given have been invaluable throughout the past years. I also feel honored and grateful that Scott Page has agreed to serve as my second co-advisor and external referee. It has been great interacting with Scott and I am very thankful for his constructive feedback. I would also like to use this opportunity to thank Lars-Erik Cederman for the invaluable feedback and guidance he has provided throughout my PhD. I would further like to express my deepest gratitude to Dan Miodownik, Sebastian Schutte and Vladimir Filimonov, three close collaborators on my PhD projects. Dan worked closely with me on the Jerusalem study that spanned most of my PhD. I am especially grateful to him for inviting me to Tel Aviv, for introducing me to Israel and making it possible to get a unique first-hand perspective of the conflict in Jerusalem. It has been great to work with Sebastian on our project on causal inference in conflict event data. I have learned a lot from working with him and very much enjoyed discussing not only our project but also science more broadly. Together with Vladimir I have worked on a project on the conflict in Iraq. It has been very rewarding to collaborate with and learn from him and I am looking forward to continuing this collaboration in the future. It has been a great pleasure and a lot of fun to work with my colleagues at ETH Zurich. I am especially thankful for the daily supervision by Thomas Chadefaux and Michael Mäs—their support, guidance and constructive feedback has been invaluable. I would further like to thank Heiko Rauhut, Sergi Lozano and Carlos Roca for their support in the first years of my PhD. I am also very grateful to Ryan O. Murphy for his support, feedback and guidance. Kurt Ackermann, Stefano Balietti, Dario Biasini, Steve Genoud, Thomas Grund, Heinrich Nax, Anders Johansson, Tobias Kuhn, Matthias Leiss, Amin Mazloumian, Maximilian Schich, Christian Schulz, Olivia Woolley and Wenjian Yu, thank you for many interesting discussions, for your feedback and support. You have not only been great colleagues but also good friends. Special thanks also to Dietmar Huber, the most helpful and nicest office manager anyone could ask for. iii Acknowledgements I am very grateful for the support my family, especially my parents, have given me over the years. It was their help and encouragement that has allowed me to pursue my studies. I am also very thankful to have great friends, far and near, that have always been there for me. Throughout the ups and downs that come with writing a PhD thesis the support of a loved one makes all the difference. Sine, you have made that difference for me. Thank you for keeping me grounded, for always being there to support me, and making my life happier and more fun every day—your love, trust and support have given me the strength to see this through. Zurich, July 2014 Karsten Donnay iv Abstract Civil conflict has been the predominate form of large-scale violence since the second half of the 20th century. The escalation of the conflict in Syria or the resurgence of the insurgency in Iraq, however, took most practitioners and academics by surprise. This underscores the lack of a deep understanding of the roots and mechanisms of civil conflict—a critical prerequisite for active and effective conflict prevention. This dissertation aims to close this gap by focusing on endogenous drivers of conflict, a focus that sets it apart from country-level analysis which typically rely on structural factors. The key conceptual motivation is that while structural determinants may set the stage for conflict, endogenous (feedback) mechanisms often determine how it plays out. Analyzing data from conflicts in Jerusalem and Iraq, this dissertation specifically addresses three central questions: First, why does intergroup contact in some circumstances exacerbate but in others mitigate violence? Second, what is the role of civilians in conflict dynamics? Are they merely bystanders or actually help shape the conflict dynamics we observe? And third, how does the scale of violence affect subsequent conflict dynamics? Addressing these questions, this dissertation builds on and contributes to a growing literature on disaggregate dynamics of civil conflict. It also harnesses the increasing availability of disaggregate conflict event data, making it possible to study conflict dynamics in more detail. This conceptual and empirical focus on smaller units of analysis, in turn, requires the development of new methodology particularly suited to analyze these data. Besides the theoretical focus on endogenous conflict processes, this dissertation, thus, also has a methodological focus. It develops new or refines existing techniques for the analysis of disaggregate conflict data. It further draws attention to data biases. These methodological contributions are, in fact, a critical prerequisite for clean inference in disaggregate settings. The studies of the conflict in Jerusalem and Iraq then empirically underscore the importance of endogenous conflict mechanisms showing that contact, civilian agency and the scale of attacks affect the trajectory of civil conflicts. Moreover, they clarify the conditions under which they deter or incite future violence and reveal the strength of these effects. This dissertation carefully places the studies in the more general context of the conceptual and theoretical framework of disaggregate research on civil conflict and highlights attendant policy implications. v Zusammenfassung Seit der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts stellen gewaltsame innerstaatliche Konflikte die vorherrschende Form von extremer Gewaltanwendung dar. Die Eskalation des Konflikts in Syrien oder das Wiedererstarken des bewaffneten Aufstands im Irak kam jedoch für viele Fachleute und Wissenschaftler überraschend. Dies deutet auf ein mangelhaftes tiefergehendes Verständnis der Ursachen und Mechanismen innerstaatlicher Konflikte hin—eine entscheidende Vorraus- setzung für aktive und effektive Konfliktprävention. Diese Doktorarbeit ziehlt darauf ab diese Forschungslücke zu schliessen, indem sie sich auf endogene Konfliktprozesse konzentriert. Mit diesem Schwerpunkt hebt sich die Arbeit klar von Studien auf Länderebene ab, die typischer- weise strukturelle Faktoren untersuchen. Die entscheidende konzeptuelle Motivation für den hier gewählten Schwerpunkt ist, dass der tatsächliche Ausgang von Konflikten häufig von endogenen (Verstärkungs-) Prozessen bestimmt wird, während strukturelle Faktoren die Voraussetzungen für Konflikte schaffen. Unter Verwendung von Daten zu Konflikten in Jerusalem und Irak konzen- triert sich diese Arbeit dabei auf drei zentrale Fragen: Erstens, warum führt Kontakt zwischen Gruppen unter manchen Umständen zu mehr unter anderen zu weniger Gewalt? Zweitens, was ist die Rolle von Zivilisten in innerstaatlichen Konflikten? Sind sie lediglich unbeteiligte Zuschauer oder beeinflussen sie die Konfliktdynamik, die wir beobachten? Und drittens, wie beeinflusst das Ausmass von Gewalt die nachfolgende Konfliktdynamik? In der Beantwortung dieser Fragen baut diese Dissertation auf einer wachsenden Literatur zur detaillierten Dynamik innerstaatlicher Konflikten auf. Die Arbeit macht sich zudem die zunehmende Verfügbarkeit von hoch aufgelösten Daten zu Konfliktereignissen zu Nutze, Daten die die detaillierte Untersuchung solcher Kon- fliktprozesse erst ermöglichen. Dieser konzeptuelle und empirische Schwerpunkt auf kleineren Beobachtungseinheiten wiederum erfordert die Entwicklung von neuen, für die Analyse dieser Daten besonders geeigneten Methoden. Diese Dissertation hat daher neben dem theoretischen Schwerpunkt auf endogenen Konfliktprozessen auch einen methodologischen Schwerpunkt, in dem sie neue Techniken für die Analyse von hoch aufgelösten Konfliktdaten entwickelt bzw. beste- hende Techniken verfeinert. Weiterhin wird die Bedeutung von verzerrten Datenerhebungen herausgearbeitet. Diese methodologischen Beiträge sind in der Tat eine kritische Voraussetzung um klare Rückschlüsse aus hochaufgelösten Daten ziehen zu können. Die Analysen der Konflikte in Jerusalem und im Irak heben empirisch die Bedeutung von endogenen Konfliktmechanismen hervor in dem sie zeigen, dass Kontakt zwischen Gruppen, die Handlungen von Zivilisten und das Ausmass von Gewalt den Ausgang von Konflikten massgeblich beeinflussen. Die Studien klären zudem unter welchen Bedingungen diese Mechanisms zu mehr bzw. weniger Gewalt führen