Ungoverned Spaces and the Development of Nonstate Armed Groups’ Violence: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

The major goal of this paper is to make a study on the connection between ungoverned spaces and nonstate armed groups through a bibliometric analysis of published documents on the SCOPUS database over a 10-year period (2011–2020). Bibliometric indicators and criteria were utilized better to understand the trends in the literature on this area. The study generates quantitative data from 201 publications published by 159 authors in 21 scholarly journals. Over the last decade, the literature has grown on various scales, from a few articles in early 2001 to over 275 documents. According to the assessment, the most important publications and writers were global in scope but predominantly from Western developed countries. Using coauthor citation analysis, the intellectual clustering composition of the knowledge base on ungoverned spaces and nonstate armed groups was found, revealing research directions: ungoverned spaces, terrorism, and international humanitarian law. The distribution of
documents across the most highly cited journals reflects the breadth, quality, and influential scholars in the ungoverned spaces domain. The contemporary research fronts in the existing literature were revealed through keyword co-occurrence analysis. Overall, the data demonstrated an unsatisfactory degree of dispersion in the literature in terms of authors and journals within the scope under study and a weak collaboration between authors, institutions, and countries. Therefore, based on the results from the analysis, the connection between ungoverned spaces and nonstate armed groups remained an emerging field with a growing
interest from various international experts in various fields, including environmental science, engineering, and strategic studies.