ABSTRACT
This chapter utilizes a recent data collection that identifies the precise location and geographic distribution of conflicts to test a series of expectations about the non-random distribution of international conflict. It examines the emergence of conflict hot spots. The chapter offers a systematic and spatially-sensitive critique of this problem and a solution to the problems that it creates. The chapter employs the Militarized Interstate Dispute Location (MIDLOC) dataset represents a useful accompaniment to the Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) 3.0 dataset. It introduces a new dataset, detailing the geographic locations of onset battlefields to accompany the MID dataset for the years 1816 to 2001. The chapter describes the application of spatial cluster analyses to these new data to demonstrate that conflict locations are clustered in time, space, and space-time in a manner that has resulted in the emergence of conflict hot spots across many regions of the world.
