4 November 2024
Guest Workshop: Sensitivity Analysis of Determinants of Conflict Onset
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Speakers
Sverke R. Saxegaard & Eric G. E. Nilsen, PhD Research Fellows, Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Norway
Abstract
What country-characteristics are robustly correlated with intrastate conflict onset? Numerous studies have over the last three decades sought to establish the determinants of intrastate conflict. In 2006, Hegre and Sambanis showed that a number of these findings were not robust. Since then, new studies have identified altogether new variables that ostensibly are determinants of intrastate conflict onset. Moreover, contemporary civil conflict has been described as fundamentally different than before, begging the question of whether their determinants are also different. This paper takes stock of the last twenty years of quantitative research on the determinants of intrastate conflict onset, by conducting a systematic sensitivity analysis of 144 individual variables. The results of the approximately 18 million regression models indicate that a vast majority of established patterns and relationships in the literature are not robust to model specifications.