| 1. |
- Geelmuyden Rød, Espen, et al.
(författare)
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A review and comparison of conflict early warning systems
- 2024
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Ingår i: International Journal of Forecasting. - : Elsevier. - 0169-2070 .- 1872-8200. ; 40:1, s. 96-112
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We review and compare conflict early warning systems on three dimensions: transparency and accessibility, key parameters, and forecasts. The review reveals a need for improved transparency and accessibility of data and code, considerable variation in key parameters across systems, and significant overlaps in countries with the highest risk. We propose that developing standards and platforms that promote transparency, accessibility, and inter-system cooperation can improve knowledge proliferation and system development to mitigate and prevent political violence.
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| 2. |
- Geelmuyden Rød, Espen, et al.
(författare)
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From bad to worse? : How protest can foster armed conflict in autocracies
- 2023
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Ingår i: Political Geography. - : Elsevier. - 0962-6298 .- 1873-5096. ; 103
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Many protest movements have brought down dictatorships and paved the way for democracy. However, protests can also foster large-scale violence at the level of civil war. How can we explain the development from protest to armed conflict? In this paper, we use geographically fine-grained data to examine how collective mobilization leads to civil war violence at the local level. We argue that two mechanisms can explain this. First, in a protest escalation dynamic, confrontations between protesters and state security forces increase the willingness of protesters to ramp up the use of force. Second, in a protest capture mechanism, protests attract attention and resources from the state, thereby providing other local non-state actors with the opportunity to use violence. We test our theoretical expectations in a spatial analysis of protests and armed conflict in autocracies from 2003 to 2014. Our results show that protests increase the risk of local armed conflict when violently repressed. Further analysis reveals that the second mechanism, protest capture, accounts for the majority of escalations to armed conflict we see in our data.
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| 3. |
- Geelmuyden Rød, Espen, et al.
(författare)
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Predicting armed conflict using protest data
- 2023
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Ingår i: Journal of Peace Research. - : Sage Publications. - 0022-3433 .- 1460-3578. ; 0:0
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Protest is a low-intensity form of political conflict that can precipitate intrastate armed conflict. Data on protests should therefore be informative in systems that provide early warnings of armed conflict. However, since most protests do not escalate to armed conflict, we first need theory to inform our prediction models. We identify three theoretical explanations relating to protest-repression dynamics, political institutions and economic development as the basis for our models. Based on theory, we operationalize nine models and leverage the political Violence Early Warning System (ViEWS) to generate subnational forecasts for intrastate armed conflict in Africa. Results show that protest data substantially improves conflict incidence and onset predictions compared to baseline models that account for conflict history. Moreover, the results underline the centrality of theory for conflict forecasting: our theoretically informed protest models outperform naive models that treat all protests equally.
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| 4. |
- Hegre, Håvard, 1964-, et al.
(författare)
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Forecasting fatalities
- 2022
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Rapport (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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| 5. |
- Hegre, Håvard, 1964-, et al.
(författare)
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ViEWS : A political violence early-warning system
- 2019
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Ingår i: Journal of Peace Research. - : SAGE Publications. - 0022-3433 .- 1460-3578. ; 56:2, s. 155-174
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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.
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| 6. |
- Hegre, Håvard, 1964-, et al.
(författare)
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ViEWS(2020) : Revising and evaluating the ViEWS political Violence Early-Warning System
- 2021
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Ingår i: Journal of Peace Research. - : Sage Publications. - 0022-3433 .- 1460-3578. ; 58:3, s. 599-611
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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.
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| 7. |
- Hellmeier, Sebastian, et al.
(författare)
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In the Spotlight : Analyzing Sequential Attention Effects in Protest Reporting
- 2018
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Ingår i: Political Communication. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1058-4609 .- 1091-7675. ; 35:4, s. 587-611
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- During waves of contention, international media attention can be of crucial importance for activists and protest participants. However, media attention is a scarce resource and the competition over news coverage is high. While some emphasize the agenda-setting power of news outlets and argue that receiving coverage is determined by factors outside the protest movement, others suggest a dynamic relationship between media attention and activism where social movement organizations are assumed to have some agency to make it to the news. In this paper, we contribute to the latter and analyze how protest can endogenously trigger more coverage. Building on insights from communication science, we argue that widely covered protests attract media attention and temporarily lower the selection threshold for subsequent incidents. Using fine-grained data on anti-regime protest in all authoritarian countries between 2003 and 2012, we find robust empirical evidence for this hypothesis. We also show that this effect becomes weaker and eventually disappears with increasing spatial and temporal distance from a highly salient event. These findings are important for research in contentious politics, since they allows us to gauge the extent to which protest activity on the ground may under certain circumstances be over-reported in the media.
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| 8. |
- Randahl, David
(författare)
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Who knows what tomorrow will bring? : Four papers on the prediction of contentious politics
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In the last decade advances in statistics, computing power, and data collection has led to an increased interest in forecasting within the field of peace and conflict research and to the adoption of a wide range of methodological approaches for making such forecasts. By making use of these more powerful forecasting methods researchers have been able to produce accurate predictions, as well as better inferences, of many different types of contentious politics events and to create operational early warning systems for such events. Adapting these forecasting methods to the social world in which politics and political behavior operate, however, is not without its challenges. This dissertation explores a number of methodological issues and advances in peace and conflict research, both inferential and forecasting oriented, through a series of four papers. In the first paper, I explore trends in democratization and autocratization using dynamic simulation. In Paper II, my co-author and I take aim at the difficulty of modeling and making forecasts with data which contains both excess zeroes and extreme-values. We propose an extreme-value and zero-inflated regression model which we use to replicate a study on the effects of UN peacekeepers on violence against civilians. Paper III explores latent variable modeling by using Markov models to make forecasts for escalation and de-escalation of armed conflicts. In the last paper, I investigate the effects of missing data and imputation techniques on the predictive performance of models. The four papers of the dissertation make several contributions to the growing literature of forecasting within peace and conflict research. First, the dissertation contributes to the methodological aspects of conflict forecasting by developing new statistical tools, Paper II, and adapting tools from other fields to different processes of armed conflict and contentious politics, Papers I & III, as well as by evaluating the practical effects of common choices in data pre-processing on the performance of forecasts in Paper IV. Second, the dissertation contributes to new ways of drawing inferences about conflict processes by anchoring the inferences in the latent state of the conflict processes in Papers II & III, and through the comparison of aggregated simulations to the historical record in Paper I. Lastly, the dissertation makes a substantive contribution to the broader field of peace and conflict research in Papers I & II by contributing to the debate on the waves of democratization and autocratization, and by nuancing the impact of UN Peacekeepers on violence against civilians.
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| 9. |
- Rød, Espen Geelmuyden, et al.
(författare)
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Empowering Activists or Autocrats? : The Internet in Authoritarian Regimes
- 2015
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Ingår i: Journal of Peace Research. - : SAGE Publications. - 0022-3433 .- 1460-3578. ; 52:3, s. 338-351
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The reported role of social media in recent popular uprisings against Arab autocrats has fueled the notion of ‘liberation technology’, namely that information and communication technology (ICT) facilitates organization of antigovernment movements in autocracies. Less optimistic observers, on the other hand, contend that ICT is a tool of repression in the hands of autocrats, imposing further restrictions on political and social liberties. We investigate whether the liberation- or the repression-technology perspective can better explain empirically observed patterns. To this end, we analyze two outcomes. First, we look at which autocracies are more likely to adopt and expand the Internet. In line with the repression technology expectation, we find that regimes aiming to prevent any independent public sphere are more likely to introduce the Internet. Second, we study the effects of the Internet on changes towards democracy. This analysis reveals no effect of the Internet on political institutions. These findings provide moderate support for the ‘repression technology’ perspective, and suggest that the Internet has not – at least in its first two decades of existence – contributed to a global shift towards democracy.
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| 10. |
- Rød, Espen Geelmuyden
(författare)
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Fraud, Grievances, and Post-election Protests in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes
- 2019
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Ingår i: Electoral Studies. - : Elsevier BV. - 0261-3794 .- 1873-6890. ; 58, s. 12-20
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Why does election fraud trigger protest in the aftermath of some competitive authoritarian elections but not others? It is often argued that post-election protests occur when information about fraud confirms and reinforces mass grievances against the regime. However, grievances are not universal in autocracies. By focusing on whether government spending primarily benefits the ruling coalition or the masses — thereby affecting economic inequality and mass grievances — the theoretical argument in this article demonstrates how fraud both can lead to post-election protests and work in the autocratic government's favor. I find evidence for the theoretical argument in an analysis of 628 competitive elections in 98 authoritarian regimes (1950-2010). More broadly, the article advances our understanding of competitive elections in autocracies by focusing on how autocratic governments pursue multiple election strategies to promote regime stability and how combinations of strategies affect popular mobilization.
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