Wars in Flux: Mixing Methods to Capture Dynamism in Armed Conflict

• In Event: Order and Violence in the International System

Abstract

How does armed conflict evolve over time and across space? The world’s most devastating armed conflicts—ranging from the Afghan civil war to the Syrian conflict— are dynamic: the contested issues at the root of the war evolve over time, new actors join and old ones disappear, and the frequency of violent events fluctuates. Likewise, the conflict-affected geographic area is not fixed. Conflict theatres across the world often start in the periphery, expand toward capital cities, or shift to a new location, including across borders. Despite vast evidence on the temporal and spatial dynamism of armed conflict, the existing conceptual and methodological tools available to capture this dynamism remain scarce. Integrating the burgeoning literature on complexity in armed conflict with quantitative works on conflict diffusion that so far have mainly spoken past each other, we argue that dynamic armed conflict can be usefully conceptualised as dynamic umbrella phenomenon containing interlinked conflicts and networks of actors involved in them. Drawing on mixed methods, we develop a dynamic unit of analysis based on this conceptualization, and a corresponding geographic unit based on annually changing concave polygons that identify areas directly affected by conflict-related violence. With this methodology, we show how accounting for dynamism in armed conflict renders findings related to the socio-economic, and political impact of armed conflict on populations more precise. It also provides entry points to enhance the effectiveness of responses to alleviate human suffering in conflict-affected regions by helping anticipate, rather than react to, dynamic change in armed conflict.

Authors

• Annette Iris Idler, University of Oxford

• Katerina Tkacova, University of Oxford