Introducing the Spatial Conflict Dynamics indicator of political violence

Modern armed conflicts have a tendency to cluster together and spread geographically. However, the geography of most conflicts remains under-studied. To fill this gap, this article presents a new indicator that measures two key geographical properties of subnational political violence: the conflict intensity within a region on the one hand, and the spatial distribution of conflict within a region on the other. We demonstrate the indicator in North and West Africa between 1997 to 2019 to show that it can clarify how conflicts can spread from place to place and how the geography of conflict changes over time

The Covid-19 pandemic has shattered the myth of a borderless Europe

The removal of border-checks and travel restrictions between EU states has been one of the most striking features of European integration. Yet as Jaume Castan Pinos and Steven M. Radil write, European governments quickly adopted tighter border controls as they sought to halt the spread of Covid-19. They argue that while national borders were once thought to be a feature of Europe’s past, the pandemic has underlined just how resilient and meaningful they continue to be

Spatializing social networks: making space for theory in spatial analysis

This study is a quantitative and spatial analysis of the gang-related violence in a section of Los Angeles. Using data about the spatial distribution of gang violence in three neighborhoods of Los Angeles, this research first adopts a deductive approach to the spatial analysis of gang violence by spatial regression models that considers the relative location of the gangs in space while simultaneously capturing their position within a social network of gang rivalries. Several models are constructed and compared and the model that seems to best fit the observed geography of violence is one in which both the territorial geography and the social geography of the gangs is utilized in the autocorrelation matrix. Building on the findings of the spatial regression modeling, the concept of social position and associated techniques of structural equivalence in social network analysis is then explored as a means to integrate these different spatialities. The technique of structural equivalence uses the two different spatialities of embeddedness to identify gangs that are similarly embedded in the territorial geography and positioned in the rivalry network which aids in understanding the overall context of gang violence. The importance of theory to guiding spatial regression modeling is demonstrated by these findings and the hybrid spatial/social network analysis demonstrated here has promise beyond this one study of gang crime as it operationalizes spatialities of embeddedness in a way that allows simultaneous systematic evaluation of the way in which social actors??? position in network relationships and spatial settings provide constraints and possibilities upon their behavior

A Tale of Two Audacities: A Response to Verweijen and van Meeteren

In this essay, we respond to the critique [see Verweijen J. and van Meeteren M. (2014) Social network analysis and the de facto/de jure conundrum: the case of security alliances and the territorialization of state authority in the post-Cold War Great Lakes region, Territory, Politics, Governance 3(1), xx-xx] of a previous paper of ours published in this journal [Radil S. M. and Flint C. (2013) Exiles and arms: the territorial practices of state making and war diffusion in post-Cold War Africa, Territory, Politics, Governance 1(2), 183-202] that used social network analysis to examine regional patterns of conflict and cooperation in the Great Lakes region of Africa. In our response we address Verweijen and van Meeteren’s specific critiques of our research methods and data and suggest that such critiques arise not from a concern about rigorous research methods but from different viewpoints within larger epistemological debates in social science. We discuss the contradictions embedded in their critiques, focusing on the implications of the current dominance of postmodern epistemology within the research communities relevant to our original paper

Exiles and Arms: The Territorial Practices of State Making and War Diffusion in Post-Cold War Africa

The end of the Cold War resulted in a wave of political change among post-colonial states in Africa. Following these political transformations was nearly two decades of war in central Africa (the so-called Africa’s World War). Building on a notion of effective sovereignty regimes, or the relationships between central state authority and state territoriality, this paper examines the territorial strategies and practices associated with the transitions to multiparty politics that enabled the space/time spread of war in the region. The attempts of existing regimes to create polities capable of returning them to power through elections gave rise to territorial practices focused on supporting exile and refugee groups that actively undermined the sovereignty of neighboring states. These territorial practices, with their roots in the democratization of single-party states, directly contributed to nearly two decades of war and human suffering in the region, while ending the wars required altogether new territorial forms of cooperation between states. This example illustrates the diverse territorial practices of states and extends the idea of sovereignty regimes by showing the implications involved in the attempts to change the forms of effective sovereignty in certain geopolitical contexts

A Relational Geography of War: Actor-Context Interaction and the Spread of World War I

Claims by geographers that the geopolitical context of international politics matters requires that context be defined and operationalized in a way that enables analyses illustrating that actors\u27 behavior varies across different contextual settings. A geographic understanding of embeddedness and relational power is meshed with a well-established contextual theory of international politics to create an operationalization of context that helps to explain the diffusion of war. Using the case of World War I, we investigate the expansion of the war from a localized political crisis in Austria-Hungary to a disastrous global scale conflict involving dozens of states. We integrate contemporary geographic thinking on context with the foundational texts of the war diffusion literature to hypothesize that war-joining behavior is explained by a political entity\u27s relative position in a simultaneously spatial and social network context. Using social network analysis-based methodologies to develop measures of context and evaluate our hypothesis, we find that context had an important impact on states\u27 war-joining behavior during World War I. An understanding of context that fuses simultaneous embeddedness in network and geographic space with relational power and the methodology of blockmodeling can be used to explore the diffusion of other wars and even other phenomena across geographically situated actors. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC