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Limits of Control — Challenges to Spatiotemporal Analysis of Sub-State War

Working Paper 66

Working Paper 66

Christian Ickler – 2014

Territorial control by violent (non-)state actors (VNSA) in sub-state war features prominently in many fundamental concepts in conflict studies. Though there have been attempts to measure this phenomenon or at least delimit it from a spatiotemporal perspective, these have so far been based either primarily on qualitative expert assessments or rely on dyadic event data to determine contested areas. In this methodological research paper, I present three approaches that can be used to estimate actor presence on basis of spatiotemporal approximation. In doing so, I focus on challenges and obstacles that can be encountered when measuring territorial control via the proxy of territorial contestation. Spatiotemporally disaggregated violent incidence data is used to analyze a small subsample of countries in sub- Saharan Africa in order to determine various ways of visualizing territorial contest. Further points of discussion include the impact of data aggregation, the availability of context data and analytical methods used for these evaluations.

Title
Working Paper 66 "Limits of Control — Challenges to Spatiotemporal Analysis of Sub-State War"
Author
Christian Ickler
Publisher
SFB 700, Research Project C2
Date
2014-11
Identifier
ISSN 1863-6896 (Print), ISSN 1864-1024 (Internet)
Language
eng
Type
Text
Format
application/pdf