Triggers of Mass Killings

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Methodology

Abstract

A rich tradition of scholarship provides a refined understanding of the socio-political landscapes in which governments are most likely to use violence against civilians, demonstrating that civilian massacres tend to occur in contexts characterized by political instability (Midlarsky 2005; Goldstone et al. 2010; Valentino 2004; Valentino, Huth, and Balch-Lindsay 2004; Ulfelder 2008), authoritarian governance (Mukherjee and Koren 2019), radical ideology (Harff 2003; Weitz 2003; Straus 2015), and histories of violence (Goldsmith et al. 2013). While past research helps identify countries with a high risk of experiencing these atrocities, we still know little about their timing and the specific events that cause governments to unleash a succession of violence against their own populations. This paper conducts a theoretical and empirical investigation of the triggers of mass killings from 1989 to 2017, identifying the specific events and sequences of events that set instruments of mass violence in motion. This paper also introduces Event Coincidence Analysis (ECA), an innovative statistical tool that originates in climatology and offers unprecedented precision for quantifying trigger-atrocity dynamics. While conventional econometric models have proven ineffective for evaluating triggering events, ECA has the power to analyze dynamic event-series and uniquely allows for inferences about the timing, strength, and directionality of triggers.

Author

• Angela Chesler, University of Notre Dame