Peer-Reviewed Books
Mukherjee, Bumba and Ore Koren. 2018. The Politics of Mass Killing in Autocratic Regimes. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer-Nature.
This book develops a detailed, disaggregated theoretical and empirical framework that explains variations in mass killing by authoritarian regimes globally, with a specific focus on Pakistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Using a combination of game-theoretic, statistical, and qualitative approaches, this project explicates when civilians within nondemocratic states will mobilize against the ruling elite, and when such mobilization will result in mass killing. In doing so, it illustrates the important role urbanization and food insecurity historically played, and will continue to play, in generating extreme forms of civilian victimization.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
Koren, Ore, and Gary Uzonyi. 2023. “The Social Origins of Rebellion: Toward a New Quantitative Research Agenda.” Forthcoming in Journal of Conflict Resolution.
Quantitative approaches to conflict research are evolving to incorporate better theoretical, methodical, and dataset tools. One key area where our progress is especially limited relates to the social origins of rebel groups: how a group’s political identity emerges as a focal point for mobilization and future conflict behaviors. We benchmark two key empirical agendas in civil war and rebellion research and then discuss key contributions of this special issue. In bringing together multiple theoretical perspectives and original datasets, including the individual-level and group-level data, the contributions to this special feature push the research frontier further along these lines. Jointly, they demonstrate that a rebel group’s origins – where it comes from, who are its constituents, what is its political appeal, and how it organizes – have far-reaching implications to explanations along different dimensions and across a wide range of contexts and regions.
Uzonyi, Gary and Ore Koren. 2023. “The Urban Origins of Rebellion.” Forthcoming in Journal of Conflict Resolution.
The emphasis in recent decades on weak state capacity as an explanation of civil war detracts from an important fact: some of the deadliest and most protracted rebellions since WWII arose not where the state was weak, but rather in areas of significant state power. This study challenges the predominance-of-peripheral-conflict paradigm by disentangling rebel formation from civil war onset and emphasizing the urban origins of numerous rebel groups. Quantitative analyses show that three group types—military-, social interest-, and political party-based groups—are far more likely to form in large cities, especially the capital, and far less likely to form in the rural countryside. Case studies then illustrate the constraints and opportunities nascent rebel groups of each type face. This study advances the field’s understanding of a surprisingly large number of violent rebellions that current mainstream approaches and the emphasis on weak states and conflict opportunities cannot effectively explain.
Koren, Ore, and Justin Schon. 2023. “Climate change, cash crops, and violence against civilians in the Sahel .” Forthcoming in Regional Environmental Change.
The possibility that climate change will increase the risk of civil war by causing agricultural decline, thereby increasing competition over scarce resources, is at the focus of a vastly expending research agenda. Yet, an emerging body of work suggests that agricultural abundance, not scarcity, drives violence. This study illustrates that debates over whether scarcity or abundance does more to drive violence can be adjudicated with greater attention to actor type (government, rebel, or militia), type of violence, and crop type. It leverages new spatiotemporal monthly data to assess the relationship between local cash crop productivity and violence against civilians by state forces, rebels, and militias, accounting for the impact of climatic and socioeconomic indicators, across 14 countries in the Sahel between January 2006 and December 2018. Aggregating data on local agricultural production for 42 crops alongside a vegetation coverage indicator, a monthly measure of local cash crop productivity is created, and its impact on the monthly rates of violence against civilian by these three actors is estimated. Results indicate that rebel and militia attacks increase by about twofold in cash crop producing locations during peak productivity months, whereas state force attacks do not. This suggests that nonstate actors are more dependent on local sources of revenue and follow demand-based incentives to use violence to facilitate appropriation.
Bagozzi Benjamin E., Thomas S. Benson, and Ore Koren. “Cyclones and Violence Against Civilians: Evidence from the Cabo Delgado Insurgency.” Forthcoming in Environment and Security.
Do natural shocks increase insurgent rates of civilian victimization? We consider one recent case of a natural shock that directly affected an ongoing rebellion, Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado insurgency, where in recent years an insurgency with few societal ties and an extremist, pro-Islamic State ideology has engaged in multiple attacks on civilians. Our assessment employs both time series analysis and qualitative evaluations. Our focus is on the effects of cyclones—a climatic event whose rates are predicted to intensify over the coming decades—on this insurgency’s use of violence against civilians. In contrast to several past studies of natural shocks in conflict zones and strategic violence against civilians, our findings suggest that in contexts of insurgencies that do not have a strong local support base and where the group purports an extremist transnational ideology, natural shocks may lead to more violence against civilians.
Vega-Oliveros, Didier A. , and Ore Koren. 2023. “Measuring Spatio-Temporal Civil War Dimensions Using Community-Based Dynamic Network Representation (CoDNet).” IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems. doi: 10.1109/TCSS.2023.3241173.
Civil war exhibits complex geospatial trends over time, which may be missed by models that rely on count-based operationalizations. Here, the spatial and temporal correlation values of monthly civil war events are transformed into their influence degree symbol, which measures geospatial concentration, spread, and intensity of civil war. We then measure variation in these degrees over time to identify relevant spatio-temporal civil war aspects. The network model is constructed using 0.5 degree grid locations as nodes, counting nearby and over time connections. We then extract the temporal community structure behind the data. We use ground truth data to visualize how our measures correlate with observed patterns, thereby illustrating our method provides accurate depictions of geospatial civil war dynamics. We also evaluate the impact of several indicators highlighted by past research and our community-based spatio-temporal measures and comparing it to the preprocessed count indicator. Our findings indicate that the relationship between state capacity and climate stress show opposite correlations with civil war as those identified by studies that use count based indicators. Counterintuitively, our results show that conflict intensifies and spreads in locations where the state is stronger and where climate conditions are improved.
Schon, Justin, Britt Koehnlein, and Ore Koren. “The need for willingness and opportunity: Analyzing where and when environmental variability influences conflict in the Sahel.” Forthcoming in Population and Environment.
Researchers and policymakers often claim that harsh climate conditions intensify the risk of armed conflict by acting as a “threat multiplier.” Yet, new data reveal that locations with seasonal environmental variations face higher conflict risk than locations with permanently harsh climate, e.g., due to the ability of populations accustomed to harsh climatic conditions to develop adaptation practices. Focusing on the Sahel, we investigate underexplored relationships between the location and timing of environmental and agricultural resource variability, and their impact on conflict. We argue that in desert-transition locations, harsh climate gives people a greater willingness to engage in competitive violence over resources compared with other locations. However, this will happen only in times of relatively high levels of environmental security and agricultural resource abundance, which give people the opportunity to act on these incentives. We test this argument on a new monthly dataset of 0.5 by 0.5-degree grid cells covering the entire African continent and find robust support for our expectations. In illustrating that both spatially and temporally disaggregated data are necessary for understanding climate-conflict relationships, our findings delineate new directions of research and policymaking.
Koren, Ore and W. Kindred Winecoff. 2022. “U.S. Federal Reserve Policies Can Cause Political Instability By Raising Bread Prices.” Food Security 14, 1431–1434.
This note argues that the monetary policies of the U.S. Federal Reserve impact food prices globally and can – by extension – affect the incidence of food riots and broader social conflict. We additionally claim that these impacts are especially likely in the case of commodities with more price-inelastic demand, staple cereals in particular, but less likely in the case of food commodities with more price-elastic demand, such as meats and oil. Using mediation analysis, we find empirical support for the impact of changes to US dollar supply on food riots from 2000-2011. We also find that this relationship extends to broader measures of social conflict (including protests, riots, strikes, etc.). We conclude with a cautionary note about how to interpret these results.
Anderson, Noel, Benjamin E. Bagozzi, and Ore Koren. “Pressed to Prolong: Conscription, the Costs of Military Labor, and Civil War Duration.” Forthcoming in International Studies Quarterly.
Existing research has identified numerous explanations for why some civil wars last longer than others. Yet, the type of labor that state militaries recruit has remained unexplored in this context. We consider how a state’s military personnel system affects its ex-post decision to keep fighting. We argue that conscription renders access to military labor relatively easy and, thus, less expensive. As military wages fall, war becomes less costly, the production of military power becomes more labor intensive, and the hazard of conflict termination declines. In a volunteer force, by contrast, military labor is relatively scarce and, therefore, more ex- pensive. Accordingly, war becomes more costly, the production of military power becomes more capital intensive, and the hazard of conflict termination rises. These effects are rein- forced as a conflict persists, leading to an increased divergence in duration across conscripted and volunteer militaries. We test these contentions using a global sample of civil wars, find- ing robust support for each expectation. We also validate the underlying mechanisms linking conscription to protracted conflict in two illustrative cases. Our results highlight the importance of labor-side determinants of war duration and contribute to a growing literature that explores how the composition of military forces affects conflict dynamics.
Schon, Justin, and Ore Koren. “AfroGrid: A Unified Framework for Environmental Conflict Research in Africa.” Scientific Data. 9, Article no. 116. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01198-5.
In this study, we present Afro-Grid: an integrated, disaggregated 0.5-degree grid-month dataset on conflict, environmental stress, and socioeconomic features in Africa covering 1989-2020, intended to propel research on these issues forward. Afro-Grid offers several important extensions for researchers and policymakers, including: (i) standardizing (using established methods) data sources on conflict, environmental stress, and socio economic factors across spatial and temporal scales; (ii) combining these data into a single, openly-available file, maximizing the accessibility of these data for researchers and policymakers regardless of their software background; and (iii) including NDVI and dual-series harmonized night lights series that have traditionally not been accessible to researchers without advanced computational expertise. Using a series of comparative regressions at the grid-month and grid-year levels, combined with reporting descriptive statistics and visualizations, we illustrate that this temporally and geographically disaggregated dataset provides valuable extensions for research related to the climate-conflict nexus and the role of socioeconomic features in shaping conflict trends, as well as for research and data-driven policy on development and conflict.
- Article
- Supplemental Appendix
- Dataverse link to all versions of AfroGrid, aggregation and replication scripts
Koren, Ore. 2022. “Quantifying the Disaggregated Impact of Atrocities on Socioeconomic Activity.” Global Studies Quarterly 2(2). ksab042.
Research on atrocities perpetrated against civilians often focuses on explaining political violence and identifying its determinants. Yet, our understanding of atrocities’ impact on socioeconomic outcomes is still limited, especially with regards to how these effects unfold at the local, rather than country, level. The present study undertakes a comprehensive evaluation of atrocities’ adverse impacts on local socioeconomic activity. I begin by reviewing literature on the impact of conflict, and violence against civilians specifically, on economic and political development. I then identify and discuss pathways linking atrocities with lower socioeconomic activity at the local level. To operationalize local socioeconomic activity, I rely on nighttime light emissions; to operationalize atrocities, I rely on data from the Worldwide Atrocity Dataset, which measures all events that resulted with at least five civilian deaths by location. To evaluate these impacts empirically, I estimate both ordinary least squares and generalized methods of moments (GMM) models, which account for potential endogeneity, on a sample measured at the localized- (.5 x .5-degree resolution) year level for the years 1997 – 2013. I find that, on average, an additional atrocity event corresponds to a decrease of 3-10% in local development levels the following year, compared with the baseline. Building on these findings, I discuss in detail research and policy implications. This study hence offers important lessons for our understanding of the effects of cruelty on political and economic phenomena, and especially its role in increasing inequalities within violence-affected zones, and across affected and nonaffected regions.
Koehnlein, Brittney and Ore Koren. 2022. “COVID-19, State Capacity, and Violence by Nonstate Actors.” Journal of Peace Research 59(1): 90-104.
The COVID-19 pandemic has constrained the ability of states across the world to govern and control their territories. As the state reduces its activities, space opens for violent nonstate actors working for and against the state to fill the vacuum. Highlighting this trend, the present study evaluates the effects of COVID-19 and pandemics more broadly on attacks by nonstate actors. Our theory emphasizes the incentives of both rebels and pro-government nonstate actors (PGNs) to increase their attack frequency as disease spreads and the state retracts its governance activities to preserve resources needed elsewhere. In the first case, we highlight how the pandemic allows rebels to reduce asymmetries of power with respect to the military and establish themselves as a viable government alternative. In the second case, PGNs, which provide an alternative to militaries, are deployed to these contested spaces to thwart or preempt rebellion during the pandemic. Employing daily level data on the annual change in armed conflict and COVID-19 cases across 127 countries between 1 January 2020 and 15 June 2020, we test both claims using an econometric identification strategy. We do not find clear evidence that COVID-19 led to a higher frequency of rebel attacks, suggesting that these groups prefer to bolster their standing using nonviolent means, or avoid fighting and preserve their resources. In contrast, we find that the frequency of PGN attacks has increased with COVID-19 prevalence compared with last year. Case studies of insurgent and PGN activity in Afghanistan and Nigeria lend additional support to these results, illustrating some underlying mechanisms. Our findings explore overlooked challenges that pandemics and other disasters pose to conflict mitigation and the role PGNs play in these contexts.
Sarbahi, Anoop, and Ore Koren. “The Moderating Effect of Democracy on Climate-Induced Social Conflict: Evidence from Indian Districts.” Forthcoming in Political Research Quarterly.
Do political institutions moderate the effect of environmental stress on social conflict? We posit that while the frequency of social conflict in developing agrarian states can increase during drought, strong democratic institutions reduce conflict and can facilitate cooperation, reversing this effect. This hypothesis is tested on a sample of all districts in India over a period from 2001–2014. The dependent variable captures the number of crimes perpetrated against scheduled castes – so-called “untouchables”– and scheduled tribes – India’s indigenous groups – during a given district-year. When the effect of drought is moderated using a local electoral competition index, findings show that although droughts increase the frequency of social conflicts where political institutions are weak, this effect is eliminated where political institutions are strong. The results are robust to alternative operationalization choices. Our findings thus have relevance both to scholars of the climate-conflict nexus and to policymakers working to address climate change’s effects.
Koren, Ore Sumit Ganguly, and Aashna Kahnna. “Fragile States, Technological Capacity, and Increased Terrorist Activity.” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism. Published online 2021.
Research on terrorism disagrees on whether terrorist activity is at its highest in collapsed states, which are more hospitable to such activities, or whether terrorism increases in more capable states. We revisit this discussion by theorizing an interactive relationship: terrorists prefer to operate in politically-hospitable states, but their attack frequency within these states increases with greater technological capacity, which allows them to expand their military, recruitment, and financing operations. We analyze 27,018 terrorist incidents using regression and causal inference models, conduct a case study, and find robust support for this interactive logic. Our conclusions outline implications for policy and academic work.
Bagozzi, Benjamin E., and Ore Koren. “The Diplomatic Burden of Pandemics: Lessons from Malaria.” Political Science Research and Methods 11(1): 214-221.
This note seeks to understand the extent of the disruptions to international relations caused by pandemics, focusing on one globally-endemic disease: malaria. We posit that longstanding diseases such as malaria have the potential to undermine the political ties of nation states, as well as the many benefits of these connections. Our argument is tested empirically using both directed-dyadic and monadic data, while incorporating methods that account for endogeneity and other relevant concerns. We find that the geographic malaria rates of a country not only serve to historically discourage foreign governments from establishing diplomatic outposts on a country’s soil, but also lead to an aggregate decrease in the total diplomatic missions that a country receives. We then discuss the current implications of these findings.
Koren, Ore, and Bumba Mukherjee. 2022. “Economic Crises, Civilian Mobilization, and Repression in Developing States.” Conflict Management and Peace Science. 39(5): 520-541. Published online 2021.
Research on the causes of repression had limited success in connecting economic crises to state-led violence. We develop an explanation for violent government repression in urban areas, which links the importance of urban infrastructure in enabling civilians to wage an effective opposition campaign with the stress caused by economic crisis, empirically validating the underlying mechanisms using disaggregated geospatial data. We then confirm the empirical expectation that governments will violently repress during times of economic crisis where the civilians’ capacity to wage a collective action campaign is high using a disaggregated global sample of urban areas within developing states.
Anderson, Noel, Benjamin E. Bagozzi, and Ore Koren. “Addressing Monotone Likelihood in Duration Modeling of Political Events.” British Journal of Political Science 51(4): 1654–1671.
This article provides an accessible introduction to the phenomenon of monotone likelihood in duration modeling of political events. Monotone likelihood arises when covariate values are monotonic when ordered according to failure time, causing parameter estimates to diverge toward infinity. Within political science duration model applications, this problem leads to misinterpretation, model misspecification, and omitted variable biases, among other issues. Using a combination of mathematical exposition, Monte Carlo simulations, and empirical applications, this article illustrates the advantages of Firth’s penalized maximum likelihood estimation in resolving the methodological complications underlying monotone likelihood. Our results identify the conditions under which monotone likelihood is most acute and provide guidance for political scientists applying duration modeling techniques in their empirical research.
Koren, Ore, and Bumba Mukherjee. 2021. “Civil Dissent and Repression: An Agency-Centric Perspective.” Journal of Global Security Studies 6(3): ogaa051.
Do governments make a strategic choice in deciding what type of security agent to use for repression? Research acknowledges the role of auxiliary groups such as militias in repression, yet surprisingly little attention is given to the state’s formal domestic security agents, such as the police. We show that formal security organizations and auxiliary groups enhance the government’s ability to repress by acting as strategic complements. As the better-regulated force, formal agents are often employed against violent riots, when regimes worry more about the ability to control the agents and their behavior more than about being visibly linked to the violence. In contrast, auxiliaries are often used to repress nonviolent campaigns, when the government seeks to benefit from agency loss in order not to be associated with the violence, which can be costly in these contexts. We empirically verify these linkages on country-month data for Africa using panel vector-autoregression (pVAR), which accounts for endogeneity, not only between the dependent and independent variables, but also the dependent variables. We complement these statistical results with case-based evidence and descriptive original data from non-African countries.
Koren, Ore, Benjamin E. Bagozzi, and Thomas Benson. 2021. “Food and Water Insecurity as Causes of Social Unrest: Evidence from Geolocated Twitter Data.” Journal of Peace Research 58(1): 67-82.
Research often fails to account for the specific pathways by which climatic factors can cause so- cial unrest. One challenge lies in understanding the distinct effects of food insecurity and water insecurity—which we term “staple insecurities”—while accounting for their interrelated nature, especially at high-resolution spatio-temporal scales. To unpack these dynamics, we leverage geolocated Twitter data across urban areas in Kenya and deploy a supervised machine learning approach to separately identify geolocated tweets concerning food and water insecurity, in both English and Swahili. The data are then aggregated to create daily measures of food and water insecurity for standardized grid-cells to examine how perceived food insecurity moderates and/or reinforces perceived water insecurity’s impacts on social unrest, and vice versa. Our findings suggest that food and water insecurities’ respective effects should be interpreted as mutually reinforcing—in compelling citizens to take to the streets—rather than as independent. Those concerned with climate change’s impact on conflict should hence endeavor to jointly account for both forms of insecurity, and their interactive effects.
Koren, Ore. 2019. “Food Resources and Strategic Conflict.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 63(10): 2236-2261.
A growing number of studies draw linkages between violent conflict and food scarcities. Yet, evidence suggests that within states, conflict revolves around food resources abundance. I develop an explanation for how the competition over food resources conditions the strategic behaviors of three actors: rebels, civilian producers who grow crops, and state forces. Using a statistical-strategic model, I validate my theory at the subnational level on new high specificity spatial data on staple crop access and productivity in Africa for the years 1998-2008 (and use the estimates to forecast conflict on out-of-sample data for 2009-2010). In line with theoretical expectations, local variations in food productivity have a positive, statistically significant, and substantive effect on the strategic behaviors of different actors. These findings suggest that the imperative for food denial as a micro level tactic in civil war should be more seriously incorporated into the work of scholars and policymakers.
Koren, Ore. 2019. “Food, State Power, and Rebellion: The Case of Maize.” International Interactions 45(1): 170-197.
Why do rebellions occur and persist in some countries but not in others? Evidence shows that natural resources affect the fighting capacity of rebel groups, yet by focusing on lucrative resources that are rare in most rebellion-afflicted countries, such as oil and diamonds, scholars neglected one necessary input for rebellion: staple crops. Focusing on maize, the world’s most prevalent staple, this study argues that, as one of the most important resources for rebel groups, maize can have a destabilizing effect on the state’s ability to thwart rebellion. These claims are corroborated statistically on a new time-varying, high-resolution global dataset of staple crop productivity, and then qualitatively through analysis of archival records on the Mau Mau rebellion. In identifying an overlooked, global linkage between agricultural abundance, state capacity, and intrastate violence, this study explains strong geographical and temporal variations in rebellions at both the subnational and global levels.
Koren, Ore. 2018. “Food Abundance and Violent Conflict in Africa.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics 100(4): 981-1006.
Scholars debate whether climate change has a consistent effect on the likelihood of armed conflict in Africa. One major pathway by which climatic variability is hypothesized to increase conflict is by decreasing food availability. However, limitations on food access at both the local and national level in many developing African countries force most armed groups and communities to depend on locally produced food. These actors are therefore likely to use violence to establish control over more food resources or be stationed where more food is available, suggesting that food abundance might also be driving conflict. The present study employs novel data on wheat and maize yields in Africa measured at the very local level to empirically evaluate this hypothesis on a highly disaggregated conflict indicator. To account for the endogenous relationship between conflict and food production, average local levels of drought are used as an instrument. The findings show that, contrary to previous expectations, conflict is driven by higher yields, on average, and not by scarcity.
Koren, Ore, and Anoop Sarbahi. 2018. “State Capacity, Insurgency and Civil War: A Disaggregated Analysis.” International Studies Quarterly 62(2): 274-288.
Country-level indicators such as gross domestic product, bureaucratic quality, and military spending are frequently used to approximate state capacity. These factors capture the aggregate level of state capacity, but do not adequately approximate the actual distribution of capacity within states. Intra-state variations in state capacity are critical to understanding the relationship between state capacity and civil war. We offer nighttime light emissions as a measure of state capacity to differentiate its impact on civil war onset within the country from its effect at the country level. We articulate pathways linking the distribution of nighttime light with the expansion of state capacity, and validate our indicator against other measures at different levels of disaggregation across multiple contexts. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that civil wars are more likely to erupt where the state exercises more control. We advance three mechanisms accounting for this counterintuitive finding: rebel gravitation, elite fragmentation, and expansion reaction. In the first scenario, state presence attracts insurgent activities. In the second, insurgents emerge as a result of the fragmentation of political elites. In the third, anti-state groups react violently to the state penetrating into a given territory. Finally, we validate these mechanisms using evidence from sub-Saharan Africa.
Koren, Ore. 2017. “Why Insurgents Kill Civilians in Capital Cities: A Disaggregated Analysis of Mechanisms and Trends.” Political Geography 61: 237-252.
Research into the causes of violence against civilians has increased significantly in recent years, yet the mechanisms governing spatial patterns of victimization remain poorly under- stood. My investigation explores if and why one specific locality, capital cities, experiences a higher frequency of violence against civilians perpetrated by armed insurgent organizations. I argue that the political value associated with capitals allows these groups to asymmetrically impose higher costs on the regime by targeting civilians in these localities. I lay out and val- idate three specific mechanisms to explain this pattern: elite coercion, popular intimidation, and international persuasion. In the first scenario insurgents aim to influence domestic elites directly. In the second, they aim is to affect domestic civilians’ resolve. In the third, they seek to influence international audiences. Using new geolocated global atrocities data for the years 1996-2009, I evaluate this linkage by employing different methodological approaches and accounting for potential reporting biases. Finally, I show that ethnic and secessionist wars are more likely to experience atrocities in the capital compared with other conflicts. The findings illustrate potential benefits from explaining the temporal and spatial variation in violence by insurgents, with a focus on strategic conditions and power asymmetries.
Koren, Ore, and Benjamin E. Bagozzi. 2017. “Living Off The Land: The Connection between Cropland, Food Security, and Violence against Civilians.” Journal of Peace Research 54(3): 351-364.
Food security has attracted widespread attention in recent years. Yet, despite preliminary evidence connecting food insecurity to political violence, we lack a systematic understanding of the relationship(s) between local food resources and violence against civilians. This study develops a food-security based theory to explain the significant variation that we observe in violence against civilians across both time and subnational geographic space. We argue that combatants, be they government or rebel actors, often must turn to local agricultural resources for sustenance. During times of relative peace, armed actors and civilians have long time horizons, and the prospects of repeated interactions thereby promote a strategy of co-optation to obtain food resources. However, the existence of immediate conflict in a region leads armed actors to discount the benefits of future interactions in favor of obtaining food immediately, using violence if necessary. In estimating a series of statistical models on a sample of all African countries (1997-2009), we find robust support for our expectations: cropland increases the frequency of violence against civilians during periods of conflict, but has an added pacifying effect during times of peace.
Bagozzi, Benjamin E., Ore Koren, and Bumba Mukherjee. 2017. “Droughts, Land Appropriation, and Rebel Violence in The Developing World.” Journal of Politics 79(3): 1057-1072.
Scholars note that rebel atrocities against civilians often arise within rural areas in the de- veloping world. This characterization is not far-fetched, and recent data show that rebel atrocities do predominately occur within rural agricultural regions. Yet, the frequency of such incidents also varies substantially across different agricultural regions and years. What accounts for this observed variation in rebel-perpetrated atrocities against civilians within agricultural areas in developing countries? We develop a formal model to address this question, which contends that severe droughts can decrease food availability, prompting civilians to allocate food for immediate consumption and become increasingly willing to defend their diminishing supplies against rebels. This leads rebels to preempt the civilians’ defensive efforts by committing atrocities, which forcibly separate civilians from their lands and food stockpiles. In empirically testing this hypothesis at the sub-national level across the developing world, we find robust support for our game-theoretic model’s predictions.
Koren, Ore. 2017. “Means to an end: Pro-government militias as a predictive indicator of strategic mass killing.” Conflict Management and Peace Science 34(5): 461-484. (Earlier 2015 online version — DOI: 10.1177/0738894215600385).
Forecasting models of state-led mass killing are limited in their use of structural indicators, despite a large body of research that emphasizes the importance of agency and security repertoires in conditioning political violence. I seek to overcome these limitations by developing a theoretical and statistical framework that highlights the advantages of using pro-government militias (PGMs) as a predictive indicator in forecasting models of state-led mass killing. I argue that PGMs can lower the potential costs associated with mass killing for a regime faced with an internal threat, and might hence ‘‘tip the balance’’ in its favor. In estimating a series of statistical models and their receiver–operator characteristic curves to evaluate this hypothesis globally for the years 1981–2007, focusing on 270 internal threat episodes, I find robust support for my expectations: including PGM indicators in state-led mass killing models significantly improves their predictive strength. Moreover, these results hold even when coefficient estimates produced by in-sample data are used to predict state-led mass killing in cross-validation and out-of-sample data for the years 2008–2013. This study hence provides an introductory demonstration of the potential advantages of including security repertoires, in addition to structural factors, in forecasting models.
Koren, Ore, and Benjamin E. Bagozzi. 2016. “From Global to Local, Food Insecurity is Associated with Contemporary Armed Conflict.” Food Security 8(5): 999-1010.
Food security has attracted widespread attention in recent years. Yet, scientists and practitioners have predominately understood food security in terms of dietary energy availability and nutrient deficiencies, rather than in terms of food security’s consequential implications for social and political violence. The present study offers the first global evaluation of the effects of food insecurity on local conflict dynamics. An economic approach is adopted to empirically evaluate the degree to which food insecurity concerns produce an independent effect on armed conflict using comprehensive geographic data. Specifically, two agricultural output measures – a geographic area’s extent of cropland and a given agricultural location’s amount of cropland per capita – are used to respectively measure the access to and availability of (i.e., the demand and supply of) food in a given region. Findings show that food insecurity measures are robustly associated with the occurrence of contemporary armed conflict.
Koren, Ore. 2014. “Military structure, civil disobedience, and military violence.” Terrorism & Political Violence 26(4): 688-712.
In this article, I argue that factors inherent to the structure of a military organization and their relationship with the political leadership play a role in the organization’s ten- dency to perpetrate violence against civilians during civil disobedience campaigns. To examine this hypothesis, I conducted a three-phased statistical analysis on a database containing 97 campaigns that took place between 1972 and 2012. In the first phase, I examined the relationship between military centric factors and violent crackdowns. In the second phase, I examined the relationship between military centric factors and mass killing. In the third stage, I examined the relationship between two specific types of discrimination in the military and mass killing. I found strong evidence supporting the hypothesis mentioned above. High-risk militaries that served a militarized regime, contained loosely regulated or indoctrinated paramilitaries, and discriminated against the protesting group, were much more likely to perpetrate violence against civilians during civil disobedience campaigns than low-risk militaries. The conclusions of this study suggest that further examination of the military’s role in perpetrating violence against civilians during protests and conflict may provide some novel findings.
Non-Peer-Reviewed Articles
Koren, Ore. “Review of Why we Fight by Mike Martin (London: Hurst & Company, 2019).” Forthcoming at the Journal of Political and Military Sociology (solicited).