Insurgency and Small Wars: Estimation of Unobserved Coalition Structures

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Trebbi, Francesco; Weese, Eric
• 署名单位: University of British Columbia; Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR); National Bureau of Economic Research; Kobe University
• 刊物名称: ECONOMETRICA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0012-9682
• DOI: 10.3982/ECTA14436
• 发表日期: 2019
• 页码: 463-496
• 关键词: nonnegative matrix factorization; Afghanistan; TUTORIAL; TALIBAN; KILL

摘要

Insurgency and guerrilla warfare impose enormous socio-economic costs and often persist for decades. The opacity of such forms of conflict is an obstacle to effective international humanitarian intervention and development programs. To shed light on the internal organization of otherwise unknown insurgent groups, this paper proposes two methodologies for the detection of unobserved coalitions of militants in conflict areas. These approaches are based on daily geocoded incident-level data on insurgent attacks. We provide applications to the Afghan conflict during the 2004-2009 period and to Pakistan during the 2008-2011 period, identifying systematically different coalition structures. Applications to global terrorism data and identification of new groups or shifting coalitions are discussed.