Disentangling Strategic and Opportunistic Looting: The Relationship between Antiquities Looting and Armed Conflict in Egypt

Dependent Variable

Positive Relationship

Strategic Looting

Opportunistic Looting

Month

Quarter

Month

Quarter

Month

Quarter

Antiquities Looting

Strong

Strong

No Support

Weak

Armed Conflict

Strong

Strong

Moderate

Strong

Overall Level of Support

Strong

Moderate

Weak

Note: The overall level of support reflects the aggregation of all the month and quarter findings for a

specific hypothesis.

3.1. Descriptive Statistics

Table

2

provides the summary statistics for antiquities looting and armed conflict at both the

month and the quarter level. The data contain significantly fewer antiquities looting incidents than

armed conflict; however, overall, they have similar distributions (see Figures

1

and

2

). Most of

the incidents occurred immediately before or during the Arab Spring (2011–2014). Based on a

---

Arts 2018, 7, 22

12 of 26

visual comparison of the graphs, it appears that there may be spikes in antiquities looting around

December 2010/January 2011 and March/April 2013. There were regime changes in Egypt in the

February of 2011 and July of 2013. This suggests that there could be a relationship between antiquities

looting and armed conflict, at least during the “Lotus Revolution” (

Teijgeler 2013

).

Table 2.

Summary statistics for monthly and quarterly data.