arts
Article
Disentangling Strategic and Opportunistic Looting:
The Relationship between Antiquities Looting and
Armed Conflict in Egypt
Michelle D. Fabiani
ID
Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA;
mrdfabiani@gmail.com; Tel.: +1-301-405-4733
Received: 30 March 2018; Accepted: 11 June 2018; Published: 14 June 2018
Abstract:
Antiquities are looted from archaeological sites across the world, seemingly more often
in areas of armed conflict. While this is not the only context in which antiquities are looted, it is an
important context and one for which much is still unknown. Previously, the relationship between
antiquities looting and armed conflict has been assessed with qualitative case studies and journalistic
evidence due to a lack of systematically collected data. This study considers the relationship between
antiquities looting and armed conflict in Egypt from 1997 to 2014 with a newly collected time
series dataset. Autoregressive Distributed Lag Models (ARDL) with a bounds testing approach
are used to assess both the overall relationship between these two phenomena and their temporal
ordering. This article finds that antiquities looting and armed conflict are, indeed, statistically related;
and that antiquities looting more often precedes armed conflict rather than the other way around.
This finding suggests that looting is more strategic than opportunistic. Implications and future
directions are discussed.
