The Intrastate Contagion of Ethnic Civil War

Abstract

Studies of civil war have shown the strategic influence of geography and space on the occurrence of conflict. While civil wars cluster and spread between states in international neighborhoods, ethnic groups within states consider their geography and location in choosing to foment rebellion. In answering why some ethnic groups turn to civil war, I unify and build on these ideas to develop a theory that ethnic civil wars follow patterns of contagion within states. I contend that ongoing conflicts in groups’ geographic proximity provides increased logistic and strategic opportunity for successful rebellion. Using spatially weighted regressions, I find evidence that ethnic civil wars are contagious within states and that such intrastate contagion is robust to other intra- and interstate neighborhood effects that may alter groups’ calculus of rebellion. These insights consistently demonstrate that accounting for groups’ broader strategic surroundings yields important implications for the study of civil war.