Income varies considerably within countries and the locations where conflicts emerge are rarely typical or representative for states at large. Yet, most research on conflict has only examined national income averages and neglected spatial variation. The authors argue that civil conflicts are more likely to erupt in areas with low absolute income, even if a country's gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is not necessarily low, and in areas with large deviations from national averages. The authors test these hypotheses empirically using spatially disaggregated data on the location of conflict outbreaks and per capita income estimates. The authors find that areas with absolute poverty indeed see more outbreaks of conflict, and they find some evidence that inequality increases the risk of conflict. Subnational information can improve on conventional country-based measures and help our understanding of how local features and variation can give rise to mobilization and violence.

A recent Climatic Change review article reports a remarkable convergence of scientific evidence for a link between climatic events and violent intergroup conflict, thus departing markedly from other contemporary assessments of the empirical literature. This commentary revisits the review in order to understand the discrepancy. We believe the origins of the disagreement can be traced back to the review article's underlying quantitative meta-analysis,

Dominant climate models suggest that large parts of Africa will experience greater climatic variability and increasing rates of drought in coming decades. This could have severe societal consequences, because the economies and food supplies of most African countries depend on rain-fed agriculture. According to leading environmental security scholars, policymakers, and nongovernmental organizations, an increase in scarcity-driven armed conflicts should also be expected. A conditional theory of environmental conflict predicts that drought increases the risk of civil war primarily when it strikes vulnerable and politically marginalized populations in agrarian societies. However, an empirical evaluation of this general proposition through a unique gridded dataset of postcolonial Africa, which combines high-resolution meteorological data with georeferenced data on civil war onset and the local ethnopolitical context, shows little evidence of a drought-conflict connection. Instead, the local risk of civil war can be explained by sociopolitical and geographic factors: a politically marginalized population, high infant mortality, proximity to international borders, and high local population density.

This article explores how insurgencies emerge and spread within a country over time through an analysis of the Maoist insurgency in Nepal. It argues that important processes underpinning the spread of insurgency are likely to change with shifts in the relative military capacity of belligerents. Importantly, insurgents can to a greater extent spread the insurgency by using coercion, material incentives, and movement of forces when they are militarily strong than when they are weak. This in turn leads to changes in the local conditions favorable to insurgency. I hypothesize that inaccessible terrains, preexisting rebel networks, and proximity to insurgent areas are likely to be important determinants of local insurgency onset during rebel weakness, but should decline in importance as the rebels gain strength. I find support for these arguments in a mixed-methods analysis of Nepal’s insurgency that combines a qualitative narrative and a quantitative event history analysis.