자연재해가 아랍 세계의 정치적 폭력에 미치는 영향 분석

Abstract

Political violence, often driven by groups with explicit political motives, has become a prominent focus in recent discourse, particularly in the context of increasing pluralisation. Concurrently, the escalating severity of natural disasters, exacerbated by climate change, has garnered significant scholarly and policy attention. Despite the relevance of both topics in the 21st century, the relationship between natural disasters and political violence remains underexplored, with existing studies offering limited and often conflicting insights. The Arab world, characterised by unique socio-political and environmental dynamics, provides a crucial yet understudied context for examining the impact of natural disasters on political violence. This study seeks to address this gap by employing topic modelling to review existing literature and analyse the dual perspectives regarding the influence of natural disasters on political violence. Subsequently, this study conducts a literature review on the divergent theories that argue whether natural disasters increase or decrease political violence. In this process, it also examines cases from the Arab world that align with both perspectives. This study utilizes data on political violence and natural disasters from the ACLED dataset and the CRED EM-DAT database and constructs a panel dataset combining cross-sectional and time-series data. This study employs the fixed-effects panel Poisson regression model, appropriate for non-negative count-dependent variables. Among the two proxies for political violence—namely, the number of incidents and fatalities—only fatalities were found to exhibit a negative relationship with the frequency of natural disasters and individuals affected by natural disasters, highlighting the potential mitigating effect of natural disasters on political violence. These results suggest that natural disasters may exert a mitigating effect on political violence, particularly in terms of fatalities. Accordingly, this study presents one of the mechanisms underlying the relationship between natural disasters and political violence within the Arab world, based on the findings, while laying a foundation for further study in this field.