The displacement of civilians is a frequent, yet understudied, outcome of armed groups’ and civilians' behavior during civil wars. In particular, I find that displacement as a strategy of armed groups is an especially undeveloped area of study, and argue that a focus on mass displacements as the dependent variable can provide leverage for explaining variation in outcomes over time and across space. I suggest that three sets of factors explain the variation: armed groups’ goals, competition among armed groups, and community governance mechanisms. After outlining the theory and hypotheses, I consider the implications of the approach for appropriate units of analysis. With data on displacement in the Colombian civil war, I use both events of massive displacement and municipal population flows as indicators of the dependent variable to consider the plausibility of the framework’s empirical implications. Finally, I propose additional qualitative, micro-level research strategies to enable tests of the mechanisms underlying the theory.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Households in Conflict Network in its series HiCN Working Papers with number
29.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: