Analyzing Spatial Drivers in Quantitative Conflict Studies: The Potential and Challenges of Geographic Information Systems

Abstract

The objective of this literature review is to understand where Graphical Information Systems (GIS) can be useful to address security issues and how it has been used until now. While the geographic drivers of territorial conflicts have been extensively described by a number of political studies, the quantitative analysis of these drivers is quite new. This study traces an evolution from conceptual research to quantitative development. It then discusses the advantages and challenges of applying new geographic techniques to analyze spatial drivers of conflict. We identify the main spatial components in conflict and security, the existing types of information/data and the quantitative methods used. We describe the spatial component of security by looking at: (i) the main sociopolitical concepts linked to territory, (ii) the kind of geographic concepts linked to territory, (iii) measures used to describe such geographic concepts; and (iv) the issues raised in any attempt to integrate geographic concepts into a GIS. We conclude that GIS tools can be useful in the analysis of civil disputes, particularly where subnational level data exists. This paper shows that spatial processing tools in GIS allow us to represent some spatial components and to address new issues such as the fuzzy complexity of border permeability.