New colleague!

How do civil conflicts evolve over time and space? Are they chaotic episodes of armed violence in fragile states or is there a predictable pattern to the diffusion of violence that we can decipher? Needless to say, these are very important questions. The typical civil conflict lasts about 10 years and wreaks havoc to the host country. If we can figure out the spatial and temporal dynamics of civil conflicts, pre-emptive actions and policies can then be devised to prevent violence from ever happening or to nip these humanitarian disasters in the bud. Nonetheless, answering these questions is not an easy feat. There are numerous challenges ranging from definitional vagueness to empirical measurement issues and scarcity of quality data. In this study, I first discuss these challenges and argue that focusing on the ultimate goal of preventing violence can be a helpful guideline in tackling them. Then I introduce a new and detailed conflict event data set on the civil conflict in Turkey. I employ this dataset and the guideline I propose to analyze the spatio-temporal evolution of this long running conflict.