Search

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.

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.

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.

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.