The Dynamics of Civil War Outcomes: Bosnia and the North Caucasus

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HSD-04333927John O'LoughlinKristian GledistschJeremy MennisGerard ToalMichael WardThis research explores civil war outcomes in Bosnia and in the North Caucasus area of Russia. Both regions experienced violent civil war in the 1990s consequent to the break-up of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. While fighting has ended in Bosnia, now under the protection of NATO forces, and conflict ebbed in adjoining republics, it continues in the North Caucasian republic of Chechnya. The PIs explore four inter-related questionst: 1) What is the character and localized distribution of economic, social, political, environmental and health outcomes of the wars in the conflict zones? 2) What factors explain these distributions? 3) How can the application of an integrated methodology of individual and aggregate data that relies on opinion survey, census, governmental, and remote sensing data collection be operationalized in a spatial analysis across a variety of scales? 4) Are postwar developments in the former conflict regions promoting or retarding interethnic harmony and democratic values, thus enhancing or reducing the prospects for long-term peace? The PIs investigate the public health effects, environmental and infrastructural effects, political attitudes, refugee movement and settlement, ethnic cleansing and separation, social interactions, and economic adjustments after wars. Data come from a variety of sources including census, electoral and other governmental data over the past 15 years, at the smallest geographic units available; opinion and attitude surveys in the zones affected by war; and remote sensing imagery at both coarse and fine resolutions to map the pre-war, conflict and post-conflict contexts. The PIs are a collaborative team representing five US universities and local research partners in Russia and Bosnia. The project builds a GIS for each study region that integrates three types of data at multiple scales. The PIs use spatial statistics including exploratory spatial data analysis, geostatistics, data mining, social network analysis, and multilevel modeling. The research deepens the empirical analysis of underlying factors of possible future conflict in the Islamic republics of the North Caucasus of Russia and in Bosnia. It also gauges the prospects for peaceful relations between nationalities in the two regions and provides answers to key questions about the nature of community conditions in former war zones as local, national and international agencies try to cope with the aggregated disruptions to peoples, economies and environments over the past 15 years. The study ascertains the scope of structural and personal damages, the separate and cumulative effects of forced and voluntary population movement, the differential impacts across localities and communities of war dynamics and the depth of national, religious or ethnic-based consciousness.