David R. Mares

'Beating the news' with EMBERS: forecasting civil unrest using open source indicators

We describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of EMBERS, an automated, 24x7 continuous system for forecasting civil unrest across 10 countries of Latin America using open source indicators such as tweets, news sources, blogs, economic indicators, and other data sources. Unlike retrospective studies, EMBERS has been making forecasts into the future since Nov 2012 which have been (and continue to be) evaluated by an independent T&E team (MITRE). Of note, EMBERS has successfully forecast the June 2013 protests in Brazil and Feb 2014 violent protests in Venezuela. We outline the system architecture of EMBERS, individual models that leverage specific data sources, and a fusion and suppression engine that supports trading off specific evaluation criteria. EMBERS also provides an audit trail interface that enables the investigation of why specific predictions were made along with the data utilized for forecasting. Through numerous evaluations, we demonstrate the superiority of EMBERS over baserate methods and its capability to forecast significant societal happenings.

Violent peace : militarized interstate bargaining in Latin America

Preface: Interstate Competition in a Heterogeneous World: The Importance of Understanding Violent PeacePart One: The Issue 1. The Origins of Violent Peace: Explaining the Use of Force in Foreign Policy2. The Latin American ExperiencePart Two: Analyzing Latin Americas Violent Peace 3. The Myth of Hegemonic Management4. Democracy, Restrained Leadership and the Use of Military Force5. The Distribution of Power and Conflict Management6. Military Leadership and the Use of Force: Illustrations from the Beagle Channel Dispute7. Democracies and the Use of Force: Suggestions from the Ecuador-Peru DisputePart Three: Conclusions 8. Militarized Bargaining in Latin America: Prospects for Diminishing its UseBibliography

Analyzing Civil Unrest through Social Media

Mining and analyzing data from social networks such as Twitter can reveal new insights into the causes of civil disturbances, including trigger events and the role of political entrepreneurs and organizations in galvanizing public opinion.

Explaining choice of development strategies: suggestions from Mexico, 1970–1982

Economic development requires choices among a broad spectrum of alternative strategies and, as the recent experience of Mexico suggests, those choices are not easy. A complex politics is involved in the transition from one development strategy to another. The international political economy and domestic social coalitions both influence the costs and benefits associated with various development policies; they rule out some choices, but numerous options still remain. How can one explain actual outcomes? Observers may significantly increase their ability to explain outcomes by incorporating a statist component into their analyses. Within the very broad parameters set by the international political economy the state influences (but does not determine) the creation and the demands of the social coalition itself. In addition, the state may use policy instruments and advantages from the domestic and international arenas to implement policy even in the face of domestic opposition. The structure of the domestic political economy determines the space within which the statist perspective contributes to explanatory power. Eventually, it is in a historically based ideology that the chief explanation for the states choice of policy and the construction of particular domestic coalitions is to be found.

Flammable Societies: Studies on the socio-economics of oil and gas

This is an important volume for theoretical and empirical reasons. The editors seek to reveal how ‘the discursive frameworks of global governance function to mediate, and indeed to construct, the asymmetric “interests” of producers and consumers within the generalised logic of global economic growth’ (p. 30). It challenges the dominance of the rational choice and ‘resource curse’ literatures on this topic; though these literatures could incorporate the impact of historical legacies of national construction and imperialism on the institutional context within which natural resource development is pursued, analysts using these approaches have a bias toward using the contemporary context for explanation. Rational choice analysts increasingly accept that a ‘resource curse’ does not exist, so this volume is not unique in articulating skepticism concerning the rhetorical and journalistic use of the concept. The book argues and demonstrates that history, values and identity can be as powerful as rents for explaining how local actors conceive of the importance of natural resources, and therefore the politics of natural resources. Flammable Societies is a necessary read for anyone interested in the political economy of oil and gas. The editors seek to go beyond the context of oil and gas by pushing Marxist theorizing regarding the governance of globally interdependent development; their goal is not to test any particular application about Marxist explanations in the current era. I will leave a review of those theoretical aspects to others and focus on the ontological, epistemological and empirical claims the authors make regarding the oil and gas sector. For non-Marxists, the importance of the book lies in the plausible impact of variables and relationships among them on natural resource politics, and thus the need to incorporate particular ones into their alternative theoretical arguments.

Discovering evolving political vocabulary in social media

As a surrogate data source for many real-world phenomena, social media such as Twitter can yield key insight into peoples behavior and their group affiliations and memberships. As an event unfolds on Twitter, the language, hashtags, and vocabulary used to describe it evolves over time, so that it is difficult to a priori capture the composition of a social group of interest using static keywords. Capturing such dynamic compositions is crucial to both understanding the true membership of social groups and in providing high-quality data for downstream applications such as trend forecasting. We propose a novel unsupervised learning algorithm that builds dynamic vocabularies using probabilistic soft logic (PSL), a framework for probabilistic reasoning over relational domains. Using 10 presidential elections from eight countries of Latin America (Mexico, Venezuela, Ecuador, Paraguay, Chile, Panama, Colombia, and Honduras), we demonstrate how our vocabulary-discovery approach helps capture dynamic trends specific to each election. The ability to grow a vocabulary concurrently with social media trends helps capture key milestones in election campaigns.

Por que os latino-americanos continuam a se ameaçarem: o uso da força militar nas relações intra latino-americanas

This article examines the ubiquity of low level use of military force among Latin American states within the context of the regional security architecture. The question is why low level uses of military force are tolerated in the region. The occurrence of militarization among Latin American states is documented, an argument about the determinants of the use of force in inter-state disputes developed and I postulate that the incentives to militarize are increasing. The security architecture for disputes among Latin American countries is evaluated and found wanting; the article ends with suggestions for diminishing the incentives to militarize.

Political Science, Public Policy, and Drug Use Prevention

Increasingly, drug use prevention programs and research are being considered in the environmental contexts in which they occur. One context that is rarely considered is the political context. This article examines the reciprocal effects of policy and prevention programs from four perspectives representing different contexts, beginning with political science, and followed by social work and public health administration, psychology, and education. Four specific issues are considered. First is how current national policies on drug use shape our nations prevention efforts, from a political science perspective. Second is how effective prevention programs can affect and shape policy change. This issue is considered from a social and public health administration perspective. Third is how policy change can act as an intervention to prevent drug use, from the perspective of psychology. The fourth issue is how dissemination of prevention programs and policies can impact drug use prevention. This question considers an educational perspective. The perspectives are integrated into a general conceptual model to improve our understanding of how drug use prevention occurs in a national political context. Finally, examples are given of how this model might inform the other perspectives represented in this special issue on transdisciplinary drug abuse prevention research.

Model-Based Forecasting of Significant Societal Events

The article outlines some salient aspects of Embers-generated forecasts through its design considerations, system architecture, and user interface.

Institutions, the Illegal Drug Trade, and Participant Strategies: What Corrupt or Pariah States Have In Common with Liberal Democracy and the Rule of Law

Institutions generate incentives that guide behavior, but many analysts and policymakers underestimate the power of institutions to affect behavior by ignoring how distinct strategies work to generate similar outcomes in different institutional contexts. This article uses the illegal trade in psychoactive substances to illustrate how outcomes (the size of the illegal drug market) across very distinct political institutions can be the same because individuals adopt different strategies in their pursuit of the same behavior: to participate in the illegal drug trade. The illegal trade in psychoactive substances represents an understudied and poorly studied issue in international relations. Arguments that focus on the deviant characteristics of governments in the developing world and organized crime to explain the trade are misleading for empirical and methodological reasons. I propose a general argument about the proliferation of the illegal drug trade that accounts for its success in countries struggling with poverty, corruption, terrorism, and pariah leaders, as well as in rich, stable democracies in which the rule of law “reigns.” The article takes factors that are often seen as distinct in explaining the drug trade (e.g., civil rights in liberal democracies and corruption in developing countries) and demonstrates that their explanatory logic represents variations on the same causal variable: the ability to conceal oneself. My insight is that the strategies used to achieve concealment vary by the institutional context in which participants find themselves.