Measuring Territorial Control in Civil Wars Using Hidden Markov Models: A Data Informatics-Based Approach
This addresses a data gap for researchers studying civil war dynamics, but it is incremental as it focuses on methodological discussion without empirical validation.
The paper tackled the lack of fine-grained data on territorial control in civil wars by proposing a theoretical model linking it to tactical choice and using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) for estimation, though it only discusses challenges and mitigation strategies without presenting concrete results or numbers.
Territorial control is a key aspect shaping the dynamics of civil war. Despite its importance, we lack data on territorial control that are fine-grained enough to account for subnational spatio-temporal variation and that cover a large set of conflicts. To resolve this issue, we propose a theoretical model of the relationship between territorial control and tactical choice in civil war and outline how Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are suitable to capture theoretical intuitions and estimate levels of territorial control. We discuss challenges of using HMMs in this application and mitigation strategies for future work.