Abstract
Is there more violence in areas with many small countries or only a single large one? I build on Bernholz (The international game of power: past, present and future 1985) to create a unifying framework where both internal and external contestants engage in conflict, and then summarize how the spatial configuration of countries affects all types of violence with the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index of state sizes. Empirically, I examine fatalities from the conflict in Africa, where I use the borders set by the colonial powers of Europe to identify the effect of concentration. I find the most fatalities in areas with many small countries, but that violence decreases with concentration at a decreasing rate and eventually increases in areas with only one large country. These findings suggest an important difference between the observed average effect of concentration on violence and the expected marginal effects of further concentration.
Highlights
Africa is a continent riddled by war, and various leaders have proposed political unification to quell the conflicts
The Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance, covers a space almost the size of Western Europe and has been filled with fighting—and this could worsen under a larger national jurisdiction
I differ by analyzing how fighting is mitigated or exacerbated by the imposed geopolitical factors that are still in play. It would be surprising if the geopolitics discussed by Bernholz (1985)—crucial to military considerations in many other regional and historical setting— would not matter for conflict in Africa. Such considerations may even interface economic motives with the internal and ethnical factors that other scholars have emphasized: when resources are highly concentrated in the political sphere, ethnic differences are seen as a way to organize interests in a competitive struggle over resources rather than as a source of comparative advantage
Summary
Africa is a continent riddled by war, and various leaders have proposed political unification to quell the conflicts. I show that the many micro effects of partitioning a region into many small countries (e.g., more external and less internal conflict) can be approximated by the effect of geopolitical concentration This unifying framework helps bring the spatial patterns of conflict in Africa to bear on the classical questions about optimal political geography (Bernholz 1985; Alesina and Spolaore 1997). It would be surprising if the geopolitics discussed by Bernholz (1985)—crucial to military considerations in many other regional and historical setting— would not matter for conflict in Africa Such considerations may even interface economic motives with the internal and ethnical factors that other scholars have emphasized: when resources are highly concentrated in the political sphere, ethnic differences are seen as a way to organize interests in a competitive struggle over resources rather than as a source of comparative advantage. These empirical results suggest that partitioning affects multiple types of contestants, that the importance of any particular type of violence depends on the spatial context, and that there is a non-monotone effect of concentration on violence in the aggregate
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