Introduction: Spaces and places: Geopolitics in an era of globalization

The theme for the International Studies Association's 2014 convention was 'Spaces and Places: Geopolitics in an Era of Globalization.' Several papers were discussed in the Special Issue of Geopolitics in an Era of Globalization. The opening article by Tollefsen and Buhaug, 'Insurgency and Inaccessibility' addresses central questions in the study of civil war and internal violent conflict, and challenges a key theoretical assumption found in many extant studies regarding the causes, onset, and development of such conflicts. In 'Population Attitudes and the Spread of Political Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa,' Linke, Schutte, and Buhaug also look at internal violence in Africa, exploring whether individual-level attitudes are associated with the occurrence and spread of conflict events. The Powers, Reeder, and Townsen article, 'Hot Spot Peacekeeping,' uses geocoded data to assess the decisions regarding location of peacekeeping forces within states involved in civil wars. They create kernel density estimates of civil war violence and peacekeeping operations at site-specific locations, generating specific variables that are then employed in regression models to evaluate the influence of battle locations in civil wars on the actual location of peacekeepers. The Beardsley and Gleditsch article, 'Peacekeeping as Conflict Containment,' explores yet another aspect of the spatial dynamics associated with peacekeeping operations by studying the relationship between peacekeeping and conflict mobility, examining whether peacekeeping affects the geographic dispersion of specific episodes of violence.