Measurement validity in historical conflict data: Comparing datasets from Spain

Conflict research usually suffers from data availability problems, which sometimes motivates the use of use of proxy variables for violent events. But since they are usually the only alternative to measure violence patterns, there is not ground-truth data to compare them to. This limitation explains why there are no studies assessing their validity. This research note exploits a case where there are two sources on political violence: the Spanish Civil War. Comparing georeferenced mass graves and direct records of victimization, I show that the differences between these two datasets are not random but respond to different data generation processes, introducing important biases. Results highlight the need for a more careful assessment when using proxy variables for political violence.

Improving Access to Education for Marginalised Girls in Conflict Areas

A high proportion of out-of-school children across the world live in conflict-affected contexts. To remove barriers to education for marginalised girls in those contexts, a key challenge is to understand the multiple and intersecting forms of marginalisation and their changing dynamics during violent conflict. Research from the REALISE education project in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) identifies key considerations for education programmes for marginalised girls in conflict areas, such as inclusive education for girls and boys, links between education and peace-building, and extra-curricular activities to support social relationships.

A Total Error Approach for Validating Event Data

Understanding how useful any particular set of event data might be for conflict research requires appropriate methods for assessing validity when ground truth data about the population of interest do not exist. We argue that a total error framework can provide better leverage on these critical questions than previous methods have been able to deliver. We first define a total event data error approach for identifying 19 types of error that can affect the validity of event data. We then address the challenge of applying a total error framework when authoritative ground truth about the actual distribution of relevant events is lacking. We argue that carefully constructed gold standard datasets can effectively benchmark validity problems even in the absence of ground truth data about event populations. To illustrate the limitations of conventional strategies for validating event data, we present a case study of Boko Haram activity in Nigeria over a 3-month offensive in 2015 that compares events generated by six prominent event extraction pipelines—ACLED, SCAD, ICEWS, GDELT, PETRARCH, and the Cline Center’s SPEED project. We conclude that conventional ways of assessing validity in event data using only published datasets offer little insight into potential sources of error or bias. Finally, we illustrate the benefits of validating event data using a total error approach by showing how the gold standard approach used to validate SPEED data offers a clear and robust method for detecting and evaluating the severity of temporal errors in event data.

Policing and Political Violence

The police are often key actors in conflict processes, yet there is little research on their role in the production of political violence. Previous research provides us with a limited understanding of the part the police play in preventing or mitigating the onset or escalation of conflict, in patterns of repression and resistance during conflict, and in the durability of peace after conflicts are resolved. By unpacking the role of state security actors and asking how the state assigns tasks among them—as well as the consequences of these decisions—we generate new research paths for scholars of conflict and policing. We review existing research in the field, highlighting recent findings, including those from the articles in this special issue. We conclude by arguing that the fields of policing and conflict research have much to gain from each other and by discussing future directions for policing research in conflict studies.

ОСНОВНЫЕ ЗАДАЧИ И ВИДЫ МОДЕРАЦИИ КАК ПРИКЛАДНОГО СПОСОБА ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ И ТЕХНОЛОГИИ УРЕГУЛИРОВАНИЯ КОНФЛИКТА

Moderation is considered in this article as a complex of social and political approaches. This article highlights the variety of aspects of moderation: essential, research, regulatory, and resolving. The actualization of different types of moderation relates to the problem of unending emergency and reproduction of the dangerous conflict forms, despite the existence of the diversity of modern regulating socio-political conflict technologies. Such dominant conflict management applied technologies as arbitration, negotiation, mediation, and facilitation are often inefficient in the regulation of complex and large-scale conflicts in the social-political sphere, because of the absence of deep and timely problem research, furthermore, the absence of technologies scientific development and conceptualization, useful for such regulation. This problem is particularly acute in the following situations: conflict active faze and escalation, non-availability of conciliation, complex and multidimensional conflict subject, global transformation of modern society values, constant mutation of various confrontation forms. Thus, the article aim is to analyze and find out the moderation potentiality in conflict research and regulation, along with attention to moderator and moderation stylistics. Moderation today is both a pedagogical, managerial, and research technology, able to solve not only the entire range of applied problems of modern conflict science, but to work with the conflict through the whole technology complex. The moderation can become the most optimal way to study and regulate various types and forms of conflict in socio-political interaction, because of its long practical experience in conducting research in the form of focus groups in different areas and situations, on a par of its serious scientific and applied social-political potentiality.

The ethics of ethnographic methods in conflict zones

This article examines the ethics of using ethnographic methods in contemporary conflict zones. Ethnographic research is an embodied research practice of immersion within a field site whereby researchers use ethnographic sensibility to study how people make sense of their world. Feminist, conflict and peacebuilding scholars who research vulnerable populations and local dynamics especially value ethnographic approaches for their emphasis on contextual understanding, human agency, egalitarian research relationships and researcher empathy. While immersion leads to knowledge that can hardly be replaced by using more formal approaches, it also elicits ethical dilemmas. These arise not only from the specific research context but also from who the researcher is and how they may navigate violent and often misogynous settings. I argue that many dilemmas may and perhaps should not be overcome by researcher skill and perseverance. Instead, ethical challenges may lead researchers to adopt limited and/or uneven immersion in their field site, not as failed or flawed ethnography but as an ethical research strategy that incorporates ethnographic sensibility to a varying extent. Examining why researchers may opt for limited and uneven immersion is important because in conflict research, stereotypes of the intrepid (male) researcher with a neutral gaze still tend to mute open discussions of how gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, class and other background factors inevitably shape immersion. This article seeks to contribute to creating discursive space for these conversations, which are vital for researchers to analyse, reflect and write from the position of a ‘vulnerable observer’ and incorporate greater transparency in the discussion of research findings.