AbstractGuns, Growth & Geography: The Geospatial Origins of InsurgencyTrack: Sustainable Development and Humanitarian Affairs Author What are the central causes of civil wars? Despite recent scholarship in political science and economics has found economic factors to be fundamental in explaining the occurrence of violent conflict, links between economic factors and war are poorly understood. This paper addresses this literature with subnational data. We introduce a novel dataset of armed insurgent groups in Africa, from 1980-2008. We locate the origin of each group's violent activities, and we rely on GIS to pair this new data with geographically-coded, subnational measures of development such as rainfall and satellite light as well as disaggregated natural resource data. Through GIS we also create other meaningful geographical variables, such as topography and measures of distance. Regression analyses show that economic shocks affecting the entire country raise the likelihood of civil war. By contrast, the likelihood of an insurgency in a given rural region shows no relationship to local economic conditions. Ben Pasquale New York University 19 W, 4th St. 2nd Floor New York, New York 10012 United States Phone: 3026522431 E-mail: bjpasquale@gmail.com Manuela Travaglianti New York University 19 W. 4th St. 2nd Floor New York, New York 10009 United States Phone: 9174564321 E-mail: manuela.travaglianti@gmail.com |