Modelling conflict resilience in the Global Conflict Risk Index

The Global Conflict Risk Index (GCRI) is a quantitative method for the prediction of conflict risk in a country in the next 1-4 years. It is modelled on 24 variables, in five dimensions: political, economical, social, environmental and the country's security status. In this paper, we explore a definition of conflict resilience as the capacity of a country to demonstrate a decreased conflict intensity, than what would be expected given its specific structural profile. We investigate the relationship between the two GCRI variables, conflict intensity and political repression, under the assumption that the eruption of a conflict in a country takes place when the population of that specific state is deprived of its fundamental rights. We note that there exists a correlation between repression and the eruption of a conflict. The correlation matrix shows that repression (REPRESS) and internal conflict (CON_INT) variables have a correlation coefficient of 0.62, which is overall one of the highest coefficients in GCRI. We then observe which countries are resilient to conflicts when they have to bear a high or increasing level of repression. The study of the regression trend lines, allows us to classify the country's type of conflict resilience according to the coefficient of the regression line (high m, low m) and the intercepts (q>0 q<0). We theorize resilience conflict as: i) stability in the face of conflict risk due to the increased level of repression, and therefore absorptive capacity, and ii) resilience as flexibility, and therefore adaptive capacity. We also observe a number of countries with reduced conflict resilience to armed conflict in the face of political repression. In the future, we plan to test resilience as the transformative capacity after the eruption of armed conflict, and the recovery rate of a country to an improved conflict risk status, using the GCRI historical data.

HALKIA Stamatia;  FERRI Stefano;  SAPORITI Francesca; 

2018-01-16

Publications Office of the European Union

JRC109188

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC109188,