From Culture to Behaviour: How Can a Culture of Violence Affect Organized Conflict?

Abstract: The reasons why some countries suffer from high levels of violence are still poorly understood despite the important attention they have received in academia. One of the potential drivers explaining spatial and temporal differences in organised conflict is the culture surrounding violence. This paper specifically attempts to explain: How does a culture of violence impact the likelihood and intensity of organised conflict? I build a theoretical framework which describes a culture of violence constituted of (at least) four dimensions. I propose that a society with a stronger culture of violence is more likely to experience armed conflict and less likely to have non-violent conflicts. I also hypothesize a positive effect on conflict intensity. I perform an exploratory factor analysis to investigate the dimensions of a culture of violence and use zero-inflated Poisson regressions to test its effect on organized conflict. The exploratory factor analysis reveals the existence of not four but at least five dimensions of culture of violence. A culture of violence does not appear to influence the likelihood of conflict. However, when conflict does occur, culture of violence seems to increase the intensity of conflicts. Unfortunately, this paper does not find sufficient support to reject the null hypotheses.