CSH Talk by Clemens Baldzuhn

Understanding armed conflicts quantitatively and systematically is crucial for uncovering the mechanisms of conflict spread and mitigating their conflagration with informed decisions. Our previous work has fruitfully shown that conflicts can be described by causally connecting unique conflict events by means of information-theoretic measures on varying temporal and spatial dimensions. The minimal assumption that the presence of conflicts spread locally leads to chains of conflict events, or “conflict avalanches,” which proved to closely resemble findings from field research. In order to more closely resemble social spreading processes, we explore how extending the model to permit spread to spatially distant conflict sites influences previous results. For this, we construct graphs for causal connections between conflict sites in Africa for a range of neighborhood degrees. Findings demonstrate that taking into account these interactions between spatially distant conflict sites loosely corresponds to increasing the spatial scale in the original model, promoting its validity.