Disaggregating Civil Wars

Our project has four main aims relating to theory, methods, data and policy: First, we aspire to offer an intergrative theoretical perspective that focuses explicitly on actor constellations and motivations within their spatiotemporal context. Second, weintend to apply and further develop a set of innovative methods that have so far not been frequently used in civil war studies, including spatial statistics, geographic information systems and computational modelling. Third, we aim at creating a new web-based "open source" environment that integrates a variety of existing and new data sources in a coherent and convenient manner. Fourth, our project is meant to serve not only academics, but also poliy-makers by providing more versatile assessments of political risks and other security problems. The Oslo node of the consortium has three sub-goals: to explain how rebel groups organize, why groups use violence, and what are the spillover effects of these issues on the general population.