La violenza nelle guerre civili: un'analisi quantitativa della violenza in Bosnia-Erzegovina

The study of violence in civil wars is one of the most discussed topics in contemporary political science. Various approaches and different specific research questions were confronted with this topic: quantitative analysis of the causes of wars have been coupled with extensive case studies and ethnographic investigations that investigated the nature of the actors of violence and the local context in which it emerges. This work, rather than resorting to traditional cross-country analysis, presents a quantitative analysis of the violence in the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995, attempting to ascertain how the main hypotheses present in the literature can explain the variation of domestic violence. Our analysis shows the centrality of the ethnic dimension for understanding the dynamics of violence: briefly put, violence is more intense in ethnically divided areas.