Spatializing the social networks of the First Congo War

This chapter discusses the diffusion of the First Congo War (1996–1997). Drawing upon a family of statistical models known as Exponential Random Graph models (ERGMs), the contribution evaluates the geographical and political drivers of the war. The results suggest that boundaries are the most salient feature in explaining the early spread of the war but that the processes of war diffusion also involved whole network-level properties that cannot be captured by more traditional statistical methods but that may be modeled using an ERGM.