Research papers
Using front lines to predict deaths in the Bosnian civil war. 2012.
To be useful for forecasting and prediction, a statistical model needs to be feasible given the data it requires. This paper examines the relationship between front lines and other, time-invariant variables, and killings during the Bosnian civil war from 1992 to 1995. It uses a Bayesian spatial count model to estimate and compare model fit to other, more established conflict models.
Presented at the 2012 IA conference in San Diego, California and the 2012 SPSA conference in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Explaining and predicting interstate war deaths. 2011.
How accurately can current rationalist conflict theories predict future interstate war deaths? Data on 89 interstate wars between 1815 and 1991 is used to estimate a truncated regression model that provides the basis for out-of sample forecasts for two other wars.
Earlier version presented as poster at the 2008 PSS(I) meeting in Claremont, California.
I’m not a nationalist, neither I hate other people, on the contrary, but I must STRONGLY PROTEST!
There was no Bosnian “civil” war. There was an aggression of Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) and Republic of Croatia (assisted by Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats), against internationally recognized state – Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and its legal Government, with the goal for that country, and for Bosniaks to dissapear from the map! Even your maps are evidence of ethnic cleansing conducted during the aggression.
Most people outside the region would refer to it as a “civil war”, whether rightly so or not. In the academic world it would be classified as a civil war according to the most common set of criteria (here’s a NYT article summarizing them), and maybe it’s also worth pointing out that there are other (civil) wars with outside involvement.
Regardless of what term one uses to describe it I don’t think anyone would dispute that there was genocide and ethnic cleansing and involvement of the remaining FRY and Croatia.
Based on the everyday meaning of the word “civil war”:
If Yugoslavia had survived as a state, it would be a civil war, but since it vanished it cannot be, notwithstanding what people outside of the region might say (I am not from there myself).
There is no meaningful sense in which it can be called a civil war.
The US civil war is a civil war because the US state survived it. The war of independence is not a civil war although it would have been if the US had remained with the British empire. If you characterize the Yugoslav wars as a civil war, then you must also characterize the war of independence as such. That’s simple math.
Ok. If I characterize the War of Independence as a civil war, what will it change? Furthermore, if the Yugoslavian conflicts were not a civil war because Yugoslavia did not survive them, but the US Civil War was one because the US survived as one state, then in other words we cannot classify a conflict until we know the outcome. Where does this leave us with ongoing conflicts? Is Syria a civil war or war of independence for someone?
I’m using “civil war” in the sense it is used in political science, based on definitions in the major data sources, e.g. the Correlates of War (http://www.correlatesofwar.org), or the Uppsala Conflict Date Progam (http://www.pcr.uu.se/research/UCDP/), which rely on the nature of the actors or organizations involved in the conflict, not the outcome.