The Cycle of Violence? An Empirical Analysis of Fatalities in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict

摘要

Thomas C. Schelling's The Strategy of Conflict (1960) laid the groundwork for thinking about conflicts as non-zaro-sum games, in which each side may choose to exercise or threaten violence in order to deter or incapacitate the opponent, or simply to exact revenge. It has been difficult, however, to test many of the predictions formulated by Schelling and others because of the lack of data on the strategic choices of the two sides engaged in a conflict, observed at a high enough frequency for statistical tests to have any power. This paper uses daily-frequency data to analyze the dynamics of violence during four years of the Second Intifada, the most recent outburst of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.