Political Theory Commons^™

Identifying Patterns In The Structural Drivers Of Intrastate Conflict, Jonathan D. Moyer, Austin S. Matthews, Mickey Rafa, Yutang Xiong

International Studies: Faculty Scholarship

Quantitative methods have been used to: (1) better predict civil conflict onset; and (2) understand causal mechanisms to inform policy intervention and theory. However, an exploration of individual conflict onset cases illustrates great variation in the characteristics describing the outbreak of civil war, suggesting that there is not one single set of factors that lead to intrastate war. In this article, we use descriptive statistics to explore persistent clusters in the drivers of civil war onset, finding evidence that some arrangements of structural drivers cluster robustly across multiple model specifications (such as young, poorly developed states with anocratic regimes). Additionally, …