Yang Chenbo

Abstract：It is of paramount significance to understand the factors influencing the scope of armed conflict in civil wars for both the countries concerned and the international conflict management regime. It is generally believed that electoral events and geographical factors may play a significant role in the outbreak and escalation of civil conflicts, but there is still room for in-depth discussions on how these factors affect the internal spillover path of civil wars. Different from common interpretations of the existing literature, this paper seeks to explore the impact of the local voting support in elections as well as socio-economic and geographical environment on the outbreak of armed conflicts and take as empirical observation objects the sub-national administrative units in the case of the Sri Lankan civil war. Therefore, this paper will examine actual impacts of the two influencing factors in the spread of internal conflicts within the same analytical framework. The empirical study has found that there is a spatial clustering effect as regards the risk of armed conflict between different units; urban-rural distance reflecting socio-economic and geographical conditions may exert a more prominent impact on local conflict risks than natural and geographical conditions; shorter distances between urban and rural areas may increase the risks of armed conflicts in both local and neighboring units; local voting support for the central government fails to play a stable role in preventing “risk spillover” and the occurrence of armed conflicts.