Project Details
Projekt
The Role of Trigger Events in Explaining and Predicting the Escalation and Diffusion of Intrastate Conflicts
Applicant
Dr. Christoph Trinn
Subject Area
Political Science
Term
from 2018 to 2019
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 414073128
Escalation dynamics and spatial diffusion are universal aspects of conflicts: Over time, all conflicts evolve in their intensity and extension. In fact, however, escalation and diffusion are instances of a more general spreading process in a two-dimensional space: A space representing either a geographical surface or a two-dimensional measure of conflict intensity involving the means of violence and its consequences. A conflict’s history is equivalent to its trajectory through such a two-layered, two-dimensional state space. Research into both escalation and diffusion has found that an interaction of structural baseline risk and initiating trigger events is at the heart of such processes. In complex networks, infinitesimal triggers actualize an existing potential and can thus cause cascades or avalanching chain reactions of virtually any size propagating through a given network. Increasing evidence shows that the intensity and extension of intrastate violent conflicts follow a “power law”: While there is a highly regular relationship between the size of an event and the frequency with which it occurs, the events are distributed highly irregularly over time, making reliable predictions almost impossible. Whereas the assessment of structural risk belongs to the standard repertoire of conflict research, a systematic analysis of trigger events, with the processes leading up to them and the trajectories which emerge from them, is still lacking. The project aims to add to our understanding of what explains the fluctuating and often unexpected variation in the intensity and extension of intrastate conflicts. By zeroing in on trigger events, the project advances the development of a theoretically unified and empirically substantiated model of the diffusion and escalation of intrastate violent conflicts. The project proceeds in five steps. The first step consists in a screening of trigger events, investigating where and when such events took place. The second step uses qualitative news analysis in order to reconstruct the conflict actors’ communications and activities as well as conflict-external discontinuities, leading to a specific initiating event. The third step consists in a systematic comparison of the empirically contextualized initiating events, resulting in a typology of trigger events. The fourth step looks at which consequent incidents ensued after the initiating event occurred, investigating whether we can detect regularities between triggers of a certain type and the further progression of the conflict. In the fifth and final step, the findings are subjected to a binary classifier evaluation in order to assess the predictive performance of the trigger event types.
DFG Programme
Research Fellowships
International Connection
Norway, USA
