A National Science Foundation funded Project on “Human and Social Dynamics,” 2004-2007.
Principal Investigators:
John O’Loughlin, Institute of Behavioral Science, Unversity of Colorado
Michael D. Ward, Department of Political Science Univerity of Washington
Gerard Toal, School of Public and International Affairs, Virginia Tech
Kristian S. Gleditsch, Department of Political Science, University of California,
San Diego
Jeremy Mennis, Department of Geography, Temple University
Click here for the Dynamics of Civil War Outcomes Project Web Site at the University of Colorado.
PROJECT PROPOSAL SUMMARY
The proposed research explores civil war outcomes in Bosnia and in the North Caucasus area of Russia. Both regions experienced violent civil war in the 1990s consequent on the break-up of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. While fighting has ended in Bosnia, now under the protection of NATO forces, it continues in the North Caucasian republic of Chechnya, though other conflicts in the adjoining republics have ebbed. This inter-disciplinary project is framed by four inter-related questions: I) What is the character and localized distribution of economic, social, political, environmental and health outcomes of the wars in the conflict zones? II) What factors explain these distributions? III) How can the application of an integrated methodology of individual and aggregate data that relies on opinion survey, census, governmental, and remote sensing data collection be operationalized in a spatial analysis across a variety of scales? IV) Are postwar developments in the former conflict regions promoting or retarding interethnic harmony and democratic values, thus enhancing or reducing the prospects for long-term peace? While many valuable works have been completed about the causes of civil war in political science, economics and ancillary disciplines, few studies have examined the consequences of violent conflict for the communities and societies in the war zone and contiguous regions. We concentrate on the public health effects (disease, health care, and differential medical accessibility), environmental and infrastructural effects (tracked using remote sensing imagery), political attitudes, refugee movement and settlement, ethnic cleansing and separation, social interactions, and economic adjustments after wars. We view civil war as the dynamic driving these multi-faceted developments. Our starting point is 1991, before the wars in both Bosnia and the North Caucasus. Data will be collected from a variety of sources including a) census, electoral and other governmental data (including multilateral agency sources – e.g. UN, OSCE) over the past 15 years, at the smallest geographic units available, b) opinion and attitude surveys in the zones affected by war using a stratification of the micro-regions to identify the sampling points that will focus on inter-ethnic relations, migration histories, personal health histories, political preferences, and post-war options, and c) remote sensing imagery at both coarse and fine resolutions (1100-250 meters and less than 5 meters) to map the pre-war, conflict and post-conflict contexts, including infrastructural damage and reconstruction, vegetation changes, residential settlement, and population dynamics. We will build a GIS for each study region that will integrate the three types of data at multiple scales. Our analytical methods will focus on spatial statistics including exploratory spatial data analysis, geostatistics, data mining, social network analysis, and multilevel modeling. The collaboration involves a core team of geographers and political scientists who bring, separately and collectively, interdisciplinary interests and experiences to the project and who have a history of successful cooperation on previous NSF-sponsored projects. The team collectively is experienced in the methodologies of spatial statistics and remote sensing and also has field expertise in the two civil war contexts. The proposal responds directly to the Human and Social Dynamics initiative by a focus on the “the implications of war and social conflict on the growth and dispersion of civilizations,” considers societies and their interaction with geography and environment in post-conflict settings, proposes the use of a variety of tools and techniques for acquiring geospatial information, and a multi-scalar analysis of the data collected. The wider impacts of this project are that it will deepen the empirical analysis of the factors that underlie possible future conflict in the Islamic republics of the North Caucasus of Russia and in Bosnia and gauge the prospects for peaceful relations between the nationalities in the two regions. It will provide answers to key issues about the nature of community conditions in former war zones as local, national and international agencies try to cope with the aggregated disruptions to peoples, economies and environments over the past 15 years. This research will be able to ascertain the scope of structural and personal damages, the separate and cumulative effects of forced and voluntary population movement, the differential impacts across localities and communities of war dynamics and the depth of national, religious or ethnic-based consciousness. Research for the project will be carried out by a collaborative team of scholars representing five US universities and local research partners in Russia and Bosnia.
Stavropol State University Professor Alexander Panin along with DCWO team leader Dr John O'Loughlin and undergraduate student review a GIS of the Russian census, Stavropol September 2005.
PROJECT RESEARCH PROGRESS
Dr John O'Loughlin and Dr Toal travelled to both Russia and Bosnia in the summer of 2005 to collect data for establishing the cluster analysis and to establish the best partner for conducting the comparative social survey. Levada Research of Moscow and Prism Research of Sarajevo were contracted to conduct social surveys in both locations. Translated and back-translated checked versions of the survey were hammered out. Approximately 75% of the questions in both surveys were similar.
In November-December 2005, a large public opinion survey (n=2000 each) was carried out in the two war zones study regions of the North Caucasus (the first scientific survey in this region) and Bosnia. The samples are representative of all major national groups in each region. The survey foci include ethnic relations, blame for the conflicts, war experiences, national self-identification and pride, ability to forgive grievances, and prospects for the future. The results offer both hope and despair for the future of these conflict regions.
In both regions, a large number of respondents have seen the conflicts directly. In Bosnia, 25% have witnessed killing and injuring of civilians in the 1992-95 war, while in the North Caucasus where the war continues in a hit-and-run guerrilla manner, 24% report witnessing human victims. The differences in this high rate is small across all ethnic groups; the wars thus have had immediate and dramatic effects on peoples’ lives, perceptions of risk, and memories.
The wars have also resulted in significant forced migration or ethnic cleansings. In Bosnia, 49% reported that they were forced to move and the figure for the North Caucasus is 11%. However, there are significant differences between national groups in this average, with Ossetians (an Orthodox Christian population) in the North Caucacaus and Bosniacs (Muslims in Bosnia) showing much higher rates than the other groups.
With respect to the causes of the wars, blame is attributed to other nationalities. In Bosnia, Serbs tend to blame 'outside interference' and Muslims for causing the breakup of Yugoslavia and for supporting radical Islamic actions in the war; Bosniacs and Croats blame Serbs for refusing to accept the independence of Bosnia; and smaller ratios of blame are also attached to Croats for their irredentist wish to be united with Croatia. All groups in BiH show high levels of support for the claim that 'criminals' are responsible for the Bosnian war. In the North Caucasus, almost half of the survey responses of all ethnicities and nationalities blame “inept Russian policies” for the continued Chechen war and its destabilization of the region. Interestingly, the second factor attributed by Muslims is to “domestic radical Islam”, the Wahhabites who have infiltrated the region in the past decade, while ethnic Russians tend to lay more blame on “international Islamic terrorism”.
On the hopeful side of the study, there is much in the surveys that generates optimism for the future, especially in Bosnia. All three groups (Muslims, Serbs and Croats) report that the almost half of their closest friends come from all nationalities and 40% state that ethnic relations have improved over the past five years (about 50% think that they are staying about the same). Ten years after the Dayton Peace Accord that ended the war, 67% of Bosnian citizens have a generally positive view of the agreement but almost half think that not enough progress has been made to build a more conherent and constitutionally-based state. Finally, 40% of Bosnians think that the arrest of war criminals is improving the climate of ethnic relations in the country, though Serbs are not as sanguine about these prospects as Bosniacs or Croats.
In the North Caucasus, no peace agreement is in sight between the federal Russian authorities and the Chechen rebels. Worringly, the conflict has periodically erupted into the neighboring ethnic republics threatening to destabilize finely-balanced ethnic relations between Muslims and Russians, and between the Muslim communities in Dagestan. A noticeable, but under-reported feature of the past decade, is the out-migration of ethnic Russians from the Muslim republics due to real or perceived intimidation and some killings. Despite these tensions, the vast majority of respondents across all ethnicities (72%) say that they trust members of other nationalities. Over half of North Caucasians (including Muslims) see themselves primarily as citizens of the Russian state rather than identifying as a member of a ethnic nation. Like Bosnia, over half of respondents list their closest friends as “mixed nationalities.” Ethnic separation, long feared as a consequence of the long-running conflicts, does not yet seem to have developed except in isolated pockets. Only 14% of the north Caucasus sample (which it should be noted excluded Chechnya) supported 'ethnic separatism' whereas the figure was 53% in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Field-work in the north Caucasus in September 2005 and October 2006, confirms the impression of good personal relations between individuals of different nationalities who all share a deep concern for the increasing criminality and lawlessness of the region. Follow-up field-work was also conducted in Bosnia in May 2006.
The research deepens the empirical analysis of underlying factors of possible future conflict and gauges the prospects for peaceful relations between nationalities in the regions. Data and findings will help to answer key questions about the nature of community conditions in former war zones, as local, national and international agencies try to cope with the aggregated disruptions to peoples, economies, and environments over the past 15 years.
Geography students and Dr Vitaly Belezerov at Stavropol State University listen to a presentation by O'Loughlin and Toal on the DCWO project.
Dr O'Loughlin together with DCWO collaborators Dr Olga Vendena, Russian Academy of Sciences and Stavropol State University Vice Rector Professor Vitaly Belezerov and Dr Vladimir Kolossov, also Russian Academy of Sciences.
PROJECT PRESENTATIONS AND PUBLICATIONS
The process of writing up the project results has begun. So far multiple papers related to the project have been presented at the Association of American Geographers 2005 meeting in Chicago, the American Political Science Association 2006 meeting in Philadelphia and the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies 2006 conference in Washington D.C.. Individual members of the team have presented aspects of the project at various universities, both domestically and internationally. Future presentations include the Association for the Study of Nationalities conference in New York, April 2007, the Association of American Geographers April 2007 conference.
A number of the academic conference papers are now under review
and will be appearing in print over the next two years. The first collection
from the project is the special issue on the North Caucasus appearing in the
journal Eurasian Geography and Economics in February 2007.
Dynamics of War Outcomes team members: Dr Vladimir Kolossov, Russian Academy of Sciences, Mladen Klemencic, Lexicographic Institute, Zagreb, Dr Gerard Toal, Virginia Tech and Dr John O'Loughlin, University of Colorado before the 'saddle' mountain in the central highlands of Dagestan facing west towards Chechnya, October 2006.
The Makhashkala Collaborative Team including Drs Eldar Eldarov, Shakhmardan Matieuv and S. Aliev.
New Urban Development on the outskirts of Makhashkala, Dagestan, Oct 2006.
Geography students at Dagestan State University listen to a presentation by O'Loughlin and Toal on the DCWO project, October 2006.