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All human interactions contain some element of power relations. In the context of social science research in which researchers seek to obtain information from research participants, these power relations are readily apparent. Who asks the questions and who answers? Do rules around the setting and which questions may be posed situate the researcher in a position of weakness, as is often the case with researching political elites (Ruffa, this symposium)? Or is the researcher in a position of power, able to induce participation by virtue of vast systemic imbalances embedded in research structures, framings, and identities?

This symposium aims to help researchers across subfields, epistemologies, and methodological approaches not only understand the importance of reflexivity, but how to apply it in practice. Reflexivity represents a basic, foundational idea: our identity as researchers matters for the validity, outcome, and ethics of our research. For the researcher, reflexivity entails thinking about oneself, one’s thinking, and one’s actions and how they affect the research lifecycle (Ben-Ari 2014, 30).

Most countries deployed their military in some capacity to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. We present original data on early pandemic-related deployments, identifying seven types of deployment: logistic operations, enforcement, international involvement, border protection, information provision, intelligence operations, and domestic protection. We find that military deployments are shaped by capacity and electoral considerations, even after accounting for cross-country differences in perceptions of the military. Countries with elected leaders were significantly more likely to deploy the military for border protection. Incumbents facing reelection were especially sensitive to electoral concerns, becoming significantly less likely to deploy the military for domestic enforcement when facing an imminent election.

Previous research has shown that military training at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst was used by the UK in the post-World War II period as a soft foreign policy tool in anticipation of decolonisation. This article builds on this work by first detailing how early attempts to introduce military training for foreign cadets replicated racial hierarchies. Second, it describes how, as the programme was re-conceived to embrace the colonial territories, race and British belonging continued to be a source of both diplomatic and domestic friction. Third, it illustrates how the programme was a contested and occasionally conflictual process within the metropole.

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.

The COVID-19 pandemic hit Nepal harder in 2021 than in the previous year, resulting in thousands dead, millions of livelihoods lost, food access constricted, educations upended, and social and economic devastation. In the midst of this, political leaders were preoccupied with power politics, leaving the country ill-equipped to manage the COVID-19 crisis. Fragile democratic institutions and norms were undermined by the inability of leaders to prioritize governance. Environmental problems, an economic downturn, and continued human rights violations further exacerbated the country's woes.

Undergraduate and master’s students frequently conduct independent human subjects research on topics related to political violence and human rights – often, but not always, in the field. This work may involve the direct collection of data from vulnerable populations, in unstable contexts and about sensitive topics. However, despite the rich literature about research ethics, the ethics of advising, enabling and encouraging this type of student research on political violence has been largely overlooked. This article aims to (1) raise awareness about the proliferation of students engaging in human subject research on topics related to political violence and human rights; (2) discuss the risks inherent in this enterprise that are distinct from those that many faculty and doctoral students face; (3) provide suggestions about how to mitigate some of those risks, including a shift away from fieldwork-based research projects. We argue that it is a collective responsibility to require that students engage in ethical practices, including more thoughtful and creative selection of research questions, sites and populations.

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.

How does state surveillance influence citizens’ willingness to express political and social opinions? This article theorizes about different citizen responses to surveillance that fall on what we term the evasion-deception spectrum, including preference falsification, self-censorship, and opting out. We present the results from an empirical exploration of these responses, drawing on an online survey experiment conducted in Japan. In our survey, we use a novel experimental stimulus to assess whether individuals engage in different forms of evasion and deception when plausibly under government surveillance. The study finds that citizens are substantially more likely to opt out of sharing their opinions (by exiting a survey) when reminded of their government’s capacity for monitoring. This occurs even despite implying a monetary cost (forfeiting payment for the survey) and in a fully consolidated democracy, where freedoms of speech and opinion are legally codified. We conclude by discussing the implications of this finding for democratic deliberation and citizen-state relations.

The ethical risks inherent in student research on political violence that involve human participants are myriad. Undergraduate and master's students face constraints that are different than those for many doctoral students and faculty researchers, and it is the responsibility of educators and academic institutions to ensure that students engage in ethical practices and to mitigate risks. This article focuses on formal mechanisms of oversight. Drawing on discussions with colleagues across the globe, we describe how institutions can design oversight mechanisms to manage student research. We present five distinct models for how ethical oversight of student research is provided in academic programs around the world, considering the costs and benefits of each model. The article concludes that whereas the creation of oversight systems can seem daunting, it is useful to start small-indeed, moving from no oversight to some oversight is a significant improvement. Programs and academic units then can build on these early efforts, experiment with other systems, and eventually develop a system that is adapted to an institution through iterative improvements based on student and faculty experiences.

Undergraduate and master's students frequently conduct independent human subjects research on topics related to political violence and human rights - often, but not always, in the field. This work may involve the direct collection of data from vulnerable populations, in unstable contexts and about sensitive topics. However, despite the rich literature about research ethics, the ethics of advising, enabling and encouraging this type of student research on political violence has been largely overlooked. This article aims to (1) raise awareness about the proliferation of students engaging in human subject research on topics related to political violence and human rights; (2) discuss the risks inherent in this enterprise that are distinct from those that many faculty and doctoral students face; (3) provide suggestions about how to mitigate some of those risks, including a shift away from fieldwork-based research projects. We argue that it is a collective responsibility to require that students engage in ethical practices, including more thoughtful and creative selection of research questions, sites and populations.

Internal party rifts in the Nepali government preoccupied leaders, who squandered opportunities to prepare a coherent response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic resulted in a four-month lockdown, with widespread economic and social consequences. The government's response to criticism was to propose legislation restricting citizens' rights, prompting accusations of creeping authoritarianism. Continued tensions along Nepal's borders led to escalated rhetoric. The crises of 2020 exacerbated existing problems with governance, social inequality, and poverty.

How does sourcing affect which events are included in international relations datasets? The increasing number of machinecoded datasets offers the promise of coding a larger corpus of documents more quickly, but existing automated processes rely exclusively on databases of news reports for coverage. We exploit source variation in the UCDP GED dataset, which includes events from media reports and non-media sources, to explore the bias introduced by including only media reports in international relations datasets. Unlike previous studies, our approach allows us to compare subnational and cross-national determinants of bias. We find that media sources severely underreport events in African countries, and coverage is also associated with country-level factors like international trade and subnational factors like access to communication technology. Non-media sources cover a significant number of events not included in media sources; their inclusion can expand coverage and reduce bias in datasets., ¿Cómo la causa afecta los acontecimientos que se incluyen en los conjuntos de datos de relaciones internacionales? La creciente cantidad de conjuntos de datos codificados por máquinas garantiza la codificación de un mayor corpus de documentos con mayor rapidez, pero los procesos automatizados existentes dependen exclusivamente de bases de datos de noticias para la cobertura. Utilizamos la variación de la fuente en el conjunto de datos de acontecimientos georreferenciados (Georeferenced Event Dataset, GED) del Programa de Datos sobre Conflictos de Uppsala (Uppsala Conflict Data Program, UCDP), que incluye acontecimientos de los informes de los medios de comunicación y fuentes que no pertenecen a los medios de comunicación, para analizar el sesgo que surge al incluir solo los informes de los medios de comunicación en los conjuntos de datos de relaciones internacionales. A diferencia de estudios anteriores, nuestro enfoque nos permite comparar los determinantes de sesgo a nivel subnacional y transnacional. Las fuentes de los medios de comunicación informan muy poco sobre los acontecimientos en los países africanos, y la cobertura también está asociada a factores nacionales, como el comercio internacional y factores subnacionales, como el acceso a la tecnología de la comunicación. Las fuentes que no pertenecen a los medios de comunicación cubren un número significativo de acontecimientos que no se incluyen en las fuentes de los medios de comunicación; su inclusión puede ampliar la cobertura y reducir el sesgo en los conjuntos de datos., Comment le sourçage affecte-t-il les événements inclus dans les jeux de données portant sur les relations internationales ? Le nombre croissant de jeux de données codés par machine offre la promesse de coder plus rapidement un plus grand corpus documentaire, mais les processus automatisés existants s’appuient exclusivement leur couverture sur des bases de données de reportages d’actualité. Nous exploitons la variation des sources du jeu de données GED de l’UCDP, qui comprend des événements provenant de reportages des médias et de sources non médiatiques, afin d’explorer le biais introduit en n’incluant que les reportages des médias dans les jeux de données portant sur les relations internationales. Contrairement aux études précédentes, notre approche nous permet de comparer les déterminants infranationaux et transnationaux du biais. Nous constatons que les sources médiatiques ne couvrent pas suffisamment les événements intervenant dans les pays africains et que cette couverture est également associée à des facteurs nationaux comme le commerce international et à des facteurs infranationaux comme l’accès aux technologies de communication. Les sources non médiatiques couvrent un nombre important d’événements non inclus dans les sources médiatiques, et leur inclusion peut élargir la couverture et réduire la partialité des jeux de données.

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.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has ushered in a global rise in state surveillance. In an effort to trace the spread of the disease and to enforce lockdowns, governments in democracies and autocracies alike have turned to surveillance technologies such as contact tracing apps. Governments have also tightened their hold on communication flows in other ways, through censorship and information manipulation. These kinds of government actions are not new: States have long recognized the value of controlling information in times of crisis. In this article, we consider these tactics in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, in which, unlike most other security threats, the threat posed is not endogenous to governance and applies to all countries. We consider how observations from this context prompt future research and reflect on the implications of information control for civil liberties.

States often seek to regulate the use of police force though citizen complaint systems. This paper examines these systems, specifically, whether patterns of bias found in other juridical contexts are mirrored in the adjudication of police assault. The analysis focuses on prosecutors as the first instance of adjudication who determine whether to move forward with investigation, effectively deciding the majority of cases. We ask whether prosecutor sex is associated with the probability that a police assault claim will be investigated. We leverage a natural experiment in Sweden where prosecutors are assigned through a modified lottery system, effectively randomizing appointment. Our findings suggest that prosecutor gender plays a role in judicial outcomes: women prosecutors are 16 percentage points more likely to investigate claims of police assault than their male counterparts. These findings have implications for scholars interested in state human rights abuses, democratic institutions, and judicial inequality.

How do international norms affect respect for human rights? We report the results of an audit experiment with foreign missions that investigates the extent to which state agents observe international norms and react to the potential of international shaming. Our experiment involved emailing 669 foreign diplomatic missions in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom with requests to contact domestic prisoners. According to the United Nations, prisoners have the right for individuals to contact them. We randomly varied (1) whether we reminded embassies about the existence of an international norm permitting prisoner contact and (2) whether the putative email sender is associated with a fictitious human rights organization and, thereby, has the capacity to shame missions through naming and shaming for violating this norm. We find strong evidence for the positive effect of international norms on state respect for human rights. Contra to our expectations, though, we find that the potential of international shaming does not increase the probability of state compliance. The positive effect of the norms cue disappears when it is coupled with the shaming cue, suggesting that shaming might have a 'backfire' effect.

Undergraduate and master’s students are increasingly conducting their own original human subjects research on topics related to political violence and human rights—often, but not always, in the field. This work typically involves the direct collection of data from vulnerable populations, in unstable contexts and about sensitive topics. However, despite the rich literature about research ethics, the ethics of advising, enabling and encouraging this type of student research on political violence has been largely overlooked. This article aims to (1) raise awareness about the proliferation of undergraduate and master’s students engaging in human subjects research on topics related to political violence and human rights; (2) discuss the risks inherent in this enterprise that are distinct from those that most faculty and doctoral students face, including little or no training in necessary methods or research ethics, few (if any) formal mechanisms of ethical oversight, short time horizons, clustering in over-researched areas, and the unlikely prospect of publication or dissemination of research results; (3) provide concrete suggestions about how to mitigate some of those risks, including a shift away from fieldwork-based research projects. We ultimately argue that it is educators’ and academic institutions’ responsibility to require that students engage in ethical practices, including discouraging some types of research.

This article shows that the statistical correlation between poverty and violence during the conflict in Nepal (1996–2006) is unlikely to be explained by grievances or low opportunity costs among the poor, but is better explained by considering the rebels’ strategy. This underscores the importance of validating arguments from statistical studies.

Common perceptions of Sweden seldom include images of ill treatment and torture. However, human rights reports published by Amnesty Int'l and the US State Dept. describe recurring allegations of ill treatment and torture perpetrated by security forces in Sweden. What explains this unexpected case of human rights abuse? The answer to this question reveals an important theoretical concept that has not previously been discussed in human rights documentation and measurement projects: the level of institutional transparency. We provide evidence of the process by which the bureaucracy in Sweden ensures an extremely high level of transparency about allegations of human rights abuse by government agents. We argue that this transparency likely varies systematically over time but especially across countries. The major implication of our study therefore travels beyond Sweden: documentation and measurement projects that do not account for differential levels of transparency of government institutions may not be comparable across cases, possibly introducing bias to cross-sectional comparisons.

This article reports on trends in organized violence from data collected by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). With almost 90,000 deaths recorded by UCDP last year, 2017 saw a decrease for the third consecutive year to a level 32% lower than the latest peak in 2014. This trend in declining levels of organized violence is driven by state-based armed conflict, and by the case of Syria in particular. Forty-nine state-based conflicts were active in 2017, down by four compared to 2016, and ten of these reached the level of war, with at least 1,000 battle-related deaths. The overall decrease in fatalities lends support to the claim that conflict deaths are in decline and that the world is increasingly peaceful. This trend holds even more strongly when controlling for increases in world population. In contrast, non-state conflict has increased: a new peak of 82 active non-state conflicts was recorded in 2017 and fatalities have increased concurrently. Much of this is due to escalating violence in DR Congo and the Central African Republic. However, fatalities from non-state conflict remain but 15% of the total number of fatalities from organized violence. As for actors engaged in one-sided violence, their number also increased during 2017, although the number of fatalities remained at the same level as in 2016.

This article examines the impact of colonial-era armed conflict on contemporary institutions. It argues that when British colonial administrators were faced with armed insurrection they responded with institutional reform of the police, and that the legacy of these reforms lives on today. Violent opposition prompted the British colonial administration to expand entrance opportunities for local inhabitants in order to collect intelligence needed to prosecute a counterinsurgency campaign. This investment in human capital and institutional reform remained when the colonial power departed; as a result, countries which experienced colonial-era conflict have more efficient policing structures today. I demonstrate how this worked in practice during the Malayan Emergency, 1948–60. Archival data from Malaysia show that local inhabitants were recruited into the police force in greater numbers and were provided with training which they would not have received had there been no insurgency. This process was consolidated and reproduced upon independence in path-dependent ways. To expand the empirical domain, I statistically explore new archival data collected from the UK National Archives on police financing across colonial territories. The results show that armed insurgency during the colonial era is associated with higher percentages of police expenditure during the colonial era and higher perceived levels of contemporary policing capacity.

Why do regimes delegate authority over a territory to nonstate militias, in effect voluntarily sacrificing their monopoly over the use of violence? This article argues that two factors increase the probability of states delegating control to a proxy militia, namely, military purges and armed conflict. Military purges disrupt intelligence-gathering structures and the organizational capacity of the military. To counteract this disruption, military leaders subcontract the task of control and repression to allied militias that have the local intelligence skills necessary to manage the civilian population. This argument is conditioned by whether the state faces an armed insurgency in a given region since intelligence, control, and repression are needed most where the state is being challenged. This hypothesis is tested on unique data for all subnational regions within Myanmar during the period 1962 to 2010 and finds that proxy militias are more likely to be raised in conflict areas after military purges.

Previous research on rebel recruitment has focused on the economic and social incentives groups use as enticements, but has overlooked the question of why many armed groups recruit using coercion. The puzzle is why coercion occurs despite alienating civilian populations and being costly in terms of organizational and military effectiveness. I argue that recruitment is a dynamic process and that groups are likely to shift recruitment strategies depending on the exigencies of the conflict. The study tests this argument by examining whether rebels are more likely to employ coercion after suffering losses on the battlefield. Using unique microlevel new data on the conflict in Nepal, the results show that the argument is supported: the more rebel fatalities on the battlefield, the more likely are rebels to employ coercion.

Common notions about the source of communal land conflict in Africa have long explained it as growing out of conditions of environmental scarcity. This article argues instead that the institutional structure of the legal system is central to understanding which countries are prone to experience communal land conflict. When competing customary and modern jurisdictions coexist in countries inhabited by mixed identity groups, the conflicting sources of legal authority lead to insecurity about which source of law will prevail. Because the source of law is contested, conflict parties cannot trust the legal system to predictably adjudicate disputes, which encourages the use of extrajudicial vigilante measures. Using new data on communal violence in West Africa, this argument is examined for the period 1990-2009. The results show that in countries where competing jurisdictions exist, communal land conflict is 200-350% more likely. These findings suggest that researchers should consider the role of legal institutions and processes in relation to social unrest and collective violence.

This article extends the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) by presenting new global data on non-state conflict, or armed conflict between two groups, neither of which is the state. The dataset includes conflicts between rebel groups and other organized militias, and thus serves as a complement to existing datasets on armed conflict which have either ignored this kind of violence or aggregated it into civil war. The dataset also includes cases of fighting between supporters of different political parties as well as cases of communal conflict, that is, conflict between two social groups, usually identified along ethnic or religious lines. This thus extends UCDP's conflict data collection to facilitate the study of topics like rebel fractionalization, paramilitary involvement in conflict violence, and communal or ethnic conflict. In the article, we present a background to the data collection and provide descriptive statistics for the period 1989-2008 and then illustrate how the data can be used with the case of Somalia. These data move beyond state-centric conceptions of collective violence to facilitate research into the causes and consequences of group violence which occurs without state participation.

This article presents a new line of inquiry into ethnicity and armed conflict, asking the question: are conflicts in which rebels mobilize along ethnic lines more likely to see intensified violence than nonethnically mobilized conflicts? The article argues that the ascriptive nature of ethnicity eases the identification of potential rebels and facilitates a rebel group’s growth, leading to an increased risk for war. This proposition is empirically tested using a Cox model on all intrastate armed conflicts 1946–2004; the results show that ethnically mobilized armed conflicts have a 92 percent higher risk for intensification to war. In extending the analysis, the study finds that the vast majority of conflicts intensified in the first year, but for every year a low-scale conflict remained active thereafter, the risk of intensification increased, peaking around year 12.

This article presents new data on the direct and deliberate killings of civilians, called one-sided violence, in intrastate armed conflicts, 19892004. These data contribute to the present state of quantitative research on violence against civilians in three important respects: the data provide actual estimates of civilians killed, the data are collected annually and the data are provided for both governments and rebel groups. Using these data, general trends and patterns are presented, showing that the post-Cold War era is characterized by periods of fairly low-scale violence punctuated by occasional sharp increases in violence against civilians. Furthermore, rebels tend to be more violent on the whole, while governments commit relatively little violence except in those few years which see mass killings. The article then examines some factors that have been found to predict genocide and evaluates how they correlate with one-sided violence as conceptualized here. A U-shaped correlation between regime type and one-sided violence is identified: while autocratic governments undertake higher levels of one-sided violence than other regime types, rebels are more violent in democratic countries.