Modeling Civil Wars Using Competing Risks Sample Clauses

Modeling Civil Wars Using Competing Risks. It is important to keep in mind that the length of a civil war is determined by the time until the civil war termination, but that there are multiple ways that a civil war can end. This means that a civil war which terminates with one particular kind of outcome therefore prevents the war from terminating in some other way. A competing risks model is an ap- propriate way to explain how these different outcomes are impact by the different variables in the model and how they compete with each other. In this project, civil wars are conceptualized as government-rebel dyad years. Each year, the dyad can continue fighting, or it can come to some kind of possible outcome that terminates the war. The possible outcomes are a government victory, a rebel victory, a formal agreement, or a transition to a low level of activity, that falls below the specific cut- off for the number of battle deaths to be classified as a civil war. If any of these outcomes are achieved, it terminates the conflict, and none of the other outcomes can be reached for that conflict. Within civil wars, the various explanatory variables can also have different impacts on the possible outcomes. For example, ▇▇▇▇▇-▇▇▇▇▇▇▇, ▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇, and ▇▇▇▇▇ (2008) ran a competing risks model on civil war outcomes. They found that higher civil war costs (as operationalized by battle deaths), was associated with an increase in the likelihood that a negotiated settlement could be reached, but a decrease in the likelihood that the rebels would have defeated the government.