Networks in Conflict: Theory and Evidence from the Great War of Africa

Abstract:

Many wars involve complicated webs of alliances and rivalries between multiple actors. Examples include the recent civil wars in Somalia, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. We study from a theoretical and empirical perspective how the network of military alliances and rivalries affects the overall conflict intensity, destruction and death toll. The theoretical analysis combines insights from network theory and from the politico-economic theory of conflict. We construct a non-cooperative model of tactical fighting featuring two novel externalities: each group’s strength is augmented by the fighting effort of its allied, and weakened by the fighting effort of its rivals. We achieve a closed form characterization of the Nash equilibrium of the fighting game, and of how the network structure affects individual and total fighting efforts. We then perform an empirical analysis using data for the Second Congo (DRC) War, a conflict involving many groups and a complex network of alliances and rivalries. We obtain structural estimates of the fighting externalities, and use them to infer the extent to which the removal of each group involved in the conflict would reduce the conflict intensity.