Conflict Hot Spots

Militarized conflicts between states appear to occur repeatedly in the same geographic regions. Both World Wars and a series of interstate disputes in the post-Cold War system had their origins in the Balkans region of Eastern Europe. Braithwaite introduces the concept of a conflict hot spot to the broader empirical literature on conflict processes. He devotes considerable time to identifying the common causes and consequences of conflict hot spots across many regions globally and by doing so offers a theoretical and empirical contribution to an emerging literature that focuses upon the spatiality of conflict processes. Rather than merely controlling for spatial dependence between episodes of conflict, this study incorporates this spatial dependence within a series of models of conflict behaviors and is, therefore, able to directly model the process of conflict diffusion.