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Measuring Temporal Dimensions of the Intensity of Violent Political Conflict

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Abstract

Violent political conflict shows patterns of varied intensity and persistence. These patterns may induce changes in human behavior in various temporal dimensions. In order to study these effects, empirical research needs a suitable way to measure conflict intensity. This paper suggests and illustrates a method of aggregating raw data on violence incidence into complementary temporal categories, in order to enrich empirical insights. We construct short-, medium-, and long-term measures based on daily fatality counts in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict between 1997 and 2011. We show that these dimensions, although constructed from the same set of raw data, contain complementary information since they are only weakly correlated. As an example, we illustrate how several such categories can be useful in modeling the dynamics of food prices. This demonstrates that such aggregations provide complementary temporal perspectives. They therefore can potentially enrich the analysis of the effects of conflict on human behavior beyond commonly employed measurements of daily or yearly frequency.

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Notes

  1. Depending on the interest of the research question and data availability, other indicators may be more applicable.

  2. By dividing all observations of each series by their mean, the shapes of the distributions can be compared more easily because each adjusted series has a mean of one.

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Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the generous support of the Deutsche Forschungs-gemeinschaft (DFG) for this research project as part of the project “The Economic Integration of Agriculture in Israel and Palestine”. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the very helpful efforts of Wassim Ghantous, Noam Preiss, Noa Tal and Suhair Abdi from B’Tselem for data gathering. Equal contribution.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Public Policy and Administration, Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management (GGFBM), Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, P.O. Box 653, 84105, Beer-Sheva, Israel

    Ofir D. Rubin

  2. Agricultural Economics and Rural Policy Group, Social Sciences Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands

    Rico Ihle

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  1. Ofir D. Rubin
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  2. Rico Ihle
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Correspondence to Ofir D. Rubin.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 9 Lag-length selection for Hebron apple price model
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Rubin, O.D., Ihle, R. Measuring Temporal Dimensions of the Intensity of Violent Political Conflict. Soc Indic Res 132, 621–642 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-016-1316-3

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