Spatial Conflict Analysis

Spatial conflict analysis models armed conflict while taking geography seriously: conflict is not randomly scattered but clusters in space, and a place's risk depends on its neighbors. Building on georeferenced data and spatial-statistical methods — as in Ward and Gleditsch's (2002) MCMC approach to the spatial context of war and peace — it uses spatial weights, tests for spatial autocorrelation, and fits spatial regression models so that conflict, peace, and their predictors are analyzed as interdependent across locations rather than as isolated observations.