Riots and Civil Conflict : Investigations into the escalatory dynamics of violent contention

Abstract: How do riots affect civil conflict? The effects of riots on escalation and civil conflict have largely been overlooked in the peace and conflict literature. I argue that this omission is of particular significance because riots could act as a potent escalatory proxy for a government authority and legitimacy crisis, a robustly supported cause of escalation and civil conflict. Drawing on civil conflict theories concerning motivation, feasibility, and contentious politics, the hypothesis as riots increase, the intensity of state-based organized violence increases was developed. To test this hypothesis, a zero-inflated negative binomial regression analysis was conducted on 14728 country-month observations from African countries between 1997 and 2020, using riot events and state-based organized violence fatality data and theoretically and empirically motivated controls. Notwithstanding certain research design limitations, the regression analysis and the complementary tests and investigation strategies yielded findings that support the hypothesis and the supposition that riots tend to affect civil conflict by increasing the intensity of state-based organized violence. The novelty of the findings opens up avenues for future research and sheds light on the value of studying lower-level societal violence and minor-scale escalatory dynamics to enhance our collective understanding of civil conflicts.