| 1. |
- Buhaug, Halvard, et al.
(författare)
-
A conditional model of local income shock and civil conflict
- 2021
-
Ingår i: Journal of Politics. - : University of Chicago Press. - 0022-3816 .- 1468-2508. ; 83:1, s. 354-366
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Common political economy models point to rationalist motives for engaging in conflict but say little about how income shocks translate into collective violence in some cases but not in others. Grievance models, in contrast, focus on structural origins of shared frustration but offer less insight into when the deprived decide to challenge the status quo. Addressing these lacunae, we develop a theoretical model of civil conflict that predicts income loss to trigger violent mobilization primarily when the shock can be linked to pre-existing collective grievances. The conditional argument is supported by results of a comprehensive global statistical analysis of conflict involvement among ethnic groups. Consistent with theory, we find that this relationship is most powerful among recently downgraded groups, especially in the context of agricultural dependence and low local level of development, whereas political downgrading in the absence of adverse economic changes exerts less influence on ethnic conflict risk.
|
|
| 2. |
- Croicu, Mihai, 1986-, et al.
(författare)
-
Communication Technology and Reports on Political Violence : Cross-National Evidence Using African Events Data
- 2017
-
Ingår i: Political research quarterly. - : SAGE Publications. - 1065-9129 .- 1938-274X. ; 70:1, s. 19-31
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The spread of Internet and mobile phone access around the world has implications for both the processe s of contentious politics and subsequent reporting of protest, terrorism, and war. In this paper, we explore whether political violent events that occur close to modern communication networks are systematically better reported than others. Our analysis app roximates information availability by the level of detail provided about the date of each political violent event in Africa from 2008 to 2010 and finds that although access to communication technology improves reporting, the size of the effect is very smal l. Additional investigation finds that the effect can be attributed to the ability of journalists to access more diverse primary sources in remote areas due to increased local access to modern communication technology.
|
|
| 3. |
- Croicu, Mihai, et al.
(författare)
-
Improving the selection of news reports for event coding using ensemble classification
- 2015
-
Ingår i: Research & Politics. - : Sage Publications. - 2053-1680. ; 2:4
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Manual coding of political events from news reports is extremely expensive and time-consuming, whereas completely automatic coding has limitations when it comes to the precision and granularity of the data collected. In this paper, we introduce an alternative strategy by establishing a semi-automatic pipeline, where an automatic classification system eliminates irrelevant source material before further coding is done by humans. Our pipeline relies on a high-performance supervised heterogeneous ensemble classifier working on extremely unbalanced training classes. Deployed to the Mass Mobilization on Autocracies database on protest, the system is able to reduce the number of source articles to be human-coded by more than half, while keeping over 90% of the relevant material.
|
|
| 4. |
|
|
| 5. |
- Croicu, Mihai, et al.
(författare)
-
Reporting of Non-Fatal Conflict Events
- 2022
-
Ingår i: International Interactions. - : Taylor & Francis. - 0305-0629 .- 1547-7444. ; 48:3, s. 450-470
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Temporally and spatial disaggregated datasets are commonly used to study political violence. Researchers are increasingly studying the data generation process itself to understand the selection processes by which conflict events are included in conflict datasets. This work has focused on conflict fatalities. In this research note, we explore how non-fatal conflict events are reported upon and enter into datasets of armed conflict. To do so, we compare reported non-fatal conflict events with the population of events in two direct observation datasets, collected using a boots-on-the-ground strategy: mass abductions in Nepal (1996-2006) and troop movements in Darfur. We show that at the appropriate level of aggregation media reporting on abductions in Nepal largely mirrors the "true" population of abductions, but at more disaggregated levels of temporal or spatial analysis, the match is poor. We also show that there is no overlap between a media-driven conflict dataset and directly-observed data on troop movements in Sudan. These empirics indicate that non-fatal data can suffer from serious underreporting and that this is particularly the case for events lacking elements of coercion. These findings are indicative of selection problems in regards to the reporting on non-fatal conflict events.
|
|
| 6. |
- Hegre, Håvard, 1964-, et al.
(författare)
-
Forecasting fatalities
- 2022
-
Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
|
|
| 7. |
|
|
| 8. |
- Hegre, Håvard, 1964-, et al.
(författare)
-
Introducing the UCDP Candidate Events Dataset
- 2020
-
Ingår i: Research & Politics. - : SAGE Publications. - 2053-1680. ; 7:3, s. 1-8
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article presents a new, monthly updated dataset on organized violence—the Uppsala Conflict Data Program Candidate Events Dataset. It contains recent observations of candidate events, a majority of which are eventually included in the Uppsala Conflict Data Program Georeferenced Event Dataset as part of its annual update after a careful vetting process. We describe the definitions, sources and procedures employed to code the candidate events, and a set of issues that emerge when coding data on organized violence in near-real time. Together, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program Candidate and Georeferenced Event Datasets minimize an inherent trade-off between update speed and quality control. Having monthly updated conflict data is advantageous for users needing near-real time monitoring of violent situations and aiming to anticipate future developments. To demonstrate this, we show that including them in a conflict forecasting system yields distinct improvements in terms of predictive performance: Average precision increases by 20–40% relative to using the Uppsala Conflict Data Program Georeferenced Event Dataset only. We also show that to ensure quality and consistency, revisiting the initial coding making use of sources that become available later is absolutely necessary.
|
|
| 9. |
- Hegre, Håvard, 1964-, et al.
(författare)
-
ViEWS : A political violence early-warning system
- 2019
-
Ingår i: Journal of Peace Research. - : SAGE Publications. - 0022-3433 .- 1460-3578. ; 56:2, s. 155-174
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article presents ViEWS – a political violence early-warning system that seeks to be maximally transparent, publicly available, and have uniform coverage, and sketches the methodological innovations required to achieve these objectives. ViEWS produces monthly forecasts at the country and subnational level for 36 months into the future and all three UCDP types of organized violence: state-based conflict, non-state conflict, and one-sided violence in Africa. The article presents the methodology and data behind these forecasts, evaluates their predictive performance, provides selected forecasts for October 2018 through October 2021, and indicates future extensions. ViEWS is built as an ensemble of constituent models designed to optimize its predictions. Each of these represents a theme that the conflict research literature suggests is relevant, or implements a specific statistical/machine-learning approach. Current forecasts indicate a persistence of conflict in regions in Africa with a recent history of political violence but also alert to new conflicts such as in Southern Cameroon and Northern Mozambique. The subsequent evaluation additionally shows that ViEWS is able to accurately capture the long-term behavior of established political violence, as well as diffusion processes such as the spread of violence in Cameroon. The performance demonstrated here indicates that ViEWS can be a useful complement to non-public conflict-warning systems, and also serves as a reference against which future improvements can be evaluated.
|
|
| 10. |
- Hegre, Håvard, 1964-, et al.
(författare)
-
ViEWS(2020) : Revising and evaluating the ViEWS political Violence Early-Warning System
- 2021
-
Ingår i: Journal of Peace Research. - : Sage Publications. - 0022-3433 .- 1460-3578. ; 58:3, s. 599-611
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article presents an update to the ViEWS political Violence Early-Warning System. This update introduces (1) a new infrastructure for training, evaluating, and weighting models that allows us to more optimally combine constituent models into ensembles, and (2) a number of new forecasting models that contribute to improve overall performance, in particular with respect to effectively classifying high- and low-risk cases. Our improved evaluation procedures allow us to develop models that specialize in either the immediate or the more distant future. We also present a formal, 'retrospective' evaluation of how well ViEWS has done since we started publishing our forecasts from July 2018 up to December 2019. Our metrics show that ViEWS is performing well when compared to previous out-of-sample forecasts for the 2015-17 period. Finally, we present our new forecasts for the January 2020-December 2022 period. We continue to predict a near-constant situation of conflict in Nigeria, Somalia, and DRC, but see some signs of decreased risk in Cameroon and Mozambique.
|
|
