Who, what, and where? Linking violence to civil wars

Civil wars are more than battles between governments and rebels; they involve a multitude of actors who perpetrate different forms of violence linked to the war in some way. However, scholars often study different types of violence perpetrated in wars in isolation rather than in their interrelationship—a compartmentalization that further widens the gap between research and practice. Despite the wide availability of disaggregated data, linking various forms of violence to one another and attributing them to a specific civil war remains a challenge. This article discusses the violence attribution problem and introduces an approach that connects different forms of war-related violence to specific civil wars using data on actors, event locations, and conflict zones. In a practical application of this approach, we introduce an R package that integrates battle and war-related violence data collected by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. The overall aim is to provide a more comprehensive measure of the violence taking place in a particular war and facilitate a better understanding of the dynamics and interrelations of different types of violence within civil wars.