Re-examining Civil War: Ethnicity, Horizontal Inequality, and Space

Ma jor literature on conflict claims that ethnicity and inequality don’t matter in predicting civil war onset. This article uses spatial data to construct new variables for horizontal inequality and asserts that viewed through this lens, ethnicity matters. We forward the argument that exclusion from central forms of power and discrimination increase the likelihood of civil war, as does territorial share. To contribute to the growing literature on civil war onset, we leverage emerging Geographic Informations Systems (GIS) data to aggregate within country variation and construct a large-N dataset. Ultimately, we claim that using spatial and GIS data has the potential to combine the ‘thickness’ of small-N case studies with the inferential power of large-N cross-country analysis.

主流冲突研究文献指出，在预测内战爆发的模型中，族群与不平等并非关键影响因素。本文借助空间数据构建了横向不平等（horizontal inequality）的全新变量，并提出：以此视角审视，族群因素实为关键影响因素。本文主张，被排斥在核心权力体系之外以及遭受歧视，均会提升内战爆发概率，领土占有份额亦然。为丰富不断发展的内战爆发研究领域的文献，本文利用新兴的地理信息系统（Geographic Information Systems，GIS）数据，整合一国内部的区域异质性，构建了大N（large-N）数据集。最终，本文提出：借助空间数据与GIS数据，有望兼顾小样本案例研究的细节厚度与大样本跨国分析的推论效力。