Nils W. Metternich

Data and progress in peace and conflict research

We highlight how efforts to collect systematic data on conflict have helped foster progress in peace and conflict research. The Journal of Peace Research has played a key role in these developments, and has become a leading outlet for the new wave of disaggregated conflict data. We survey progress in the development of conflict data and how this interacts with theory development and progress in research, drawing specifically on examples from the move towards a greater focus on disaggregation and agency in conflict research. We focus on disaggregation in three specific dimensions, namely the resolution of conflict data, agency in conflict data, and the specific strategies used in conflict, and we also discuss new efforts to study conflict processes beyond the use of violence. We look ahead to new challenges in conflict research and how data developments and the emergence of ‘big data’ push us to think harder about types of conflict, agency, and the ‘right’ level of aggregation for querying data and evaluating specific theories.

Expecting Elections: Interventions, Ethnic Support, and the Duration of Civil Wars

International organizations (IOs) frequently link their military interventions with democratization efforts in the target state. However, existing research suggests that these attempts often fail. This article analyzes the conditions under which interventions by IOs shorten or prolong civil war dyads. When militarily strong rebel groups with low public support expect externally enforced democratization, they have incentives to continue fighting. These incentives arise when democratization leads to power shifts that cause commitment problems for belligerents with high popular support. Cox hazards models are used to test the article’s hypotheses on a new data set on African rebel leaders’ ethnicity. The results demonstrate that IO interventions with democratization mandates are only associated with shorter conflicts if rebel leaders come from ethnic groups representing more than 10 percent of a country’s population. IO interventions without democratization mandates are not associated with shorter conflict duration and show no interaction effect with the rebels’ ethnic support.

Introduction: Forecasting in peace research

Prediction and forecasting have now fully reached peace and conflict research. We define forecasting as predictions about unrealized outcomes given model estimates from realized data, and predictions more generally as the assignment of probability distributions to realized or unrealized outcomes. Increasingly, scholars present within- and out-of-sample prediction results in their publications and sometimes even forecasts for unrealized, future outcomes. The articles in this special issue demonstrate the ability of current approaches to forecast events of interest and contributes to the formulation of best practices for forecasting within peace research. We highlight the role of forecasting for theory evaluation and as a bridge between academics and policymakers, summarize the contributions in the special issue, and provide some thoughts on how research on forecasting in peace research should proceed. We suggest some best practices, noting the importance of theory development, interpretability of models, r...Prediction and forecasting have now fully reached peace and conflict research. We define forecasting as predictions about unrealized outcomes given model estimates from realized data, and predictions more generally as the assignment of probability distributions to realized or unrealized outcomes. Increasingly, scholars present within- and out-of-sample prediction results in their publications and sometimes even forecasts for unrealized, future outcomes. The articles in this special issue demonstrate the ability of current approaches to forecast events of interest and contributes to the formulation of best practices for forecasting within peace research. We highlight the role of forecasting for theory evaluation and as a bridge between academics and policymakers, summarize the contributions in the special issue, and provide some thoughts on how research on forecasting in peace research should proceed. We suggest some best practices, noting the importance of theory development, interpretability of models, replicability of results, and data collection.

Firewall? or Wall on Fire? A Unified Framework of Conflict Contagion and the Role of Ethnic Exclusion

While some borders are real firewalls against conflicts, others appear like tinder just waiting for the smallest spark. Only recently has research focused on the transnational perspective of conflict and current research has focused mostly on isolated aspects of this phenomenon. In this article, we provide a unified framework for conflict contagion that takes into account receiver, sender, dyad, and network effects. This is a novel perspective on conflict contagion, and our empirical results suggest that distinguishing between sender and receiver effects allows for a better understanding of spillover effects. We provide insights that especially excluded ethnic groups impact the risk of countries sending and receiving conflicts from its neighbors.

The flight of white-collars: Civil conflict, availability of medical service providers and public health.

Civil conflicts devastate public health both in the short run and in the long run. Analyzing novel data sets that include yearly information on public health and the availability of health professionals across provinces in Turkey in the 1964-2010 period, we provide empirical evidence for our theoretical argument that a major mechanism through which civil conflicts exert their long term negative influences on public health is by discouraging medical personnel to practice in conflict regions. We also assess the effectiveness of certain policy measures that Turkish governments have tried out over the years to counteract this mechanism. Our results reveal that the long running civil conflict in Turkey has been driving away doctors and other highly trained medical personnel from conflict areas and that mandatory service requirements do help counteract this flight.

The JPR Best Visualization Award 2016 goes to Brandon J Kinne

The jury consisting of Nils B Weidmann (University of Konstanz), Hanne Fjelde (Uppsala University) and Michael D Ward (Duke University) has awarded the fourth JPR Best Visualization Award to Brandon J Kinne (University of California, Davis). The prize-winning article is titled ‘Agreeing to arm: Bilateral weapons agreements and the global arms trade’ and was published in the 2016 special issue on ‘Networked International Politics’, Journal of Peace Research 53(3): 359–377. The author relies on different types of visualizations to illustrate key aspects of the theory, the data used for the analysis, and the results. Two line graphs at the beginning of the article help to motivate the research question. A set of carefully crafted, eye-catching network visualizations show the structure of the weapons agreement networks examined in the article, and how they evolved over time. This is supplemented with a map to illustrate the spatial distribution of these agreements. Finally, the author goes to great lengths to present the results from the model estimation using coefficient plots, using color to highlight significant results. These plots also illustrate how particular coefficients vary over time. The jury found this to be an impressive way to present a large number of results effectively. Overall, Kinne’s article is exemplary not only because of its interesting analysis, but also due to the number of aesthetically pleasing and informative graphics.

The Nils Petter Gleditsch JPR Article of the Year Award, 2016, goes to Charles Miller and Benjamin S Barber IV

A jury consisting of Indra de Soysa (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), Emilie Hafner-Burton (University of California, San Diego), and Vally Koubi (ETH, Zurich) has awarded the 2016 Journal of Peace Research ‘Nils Petter Gleditsch Article of the Year Award’ to Charles Miller (Australian National University) and Benjamin S Barber IV (IE Business School, Madrid). The jury was faced with the very difficult task of selecting one winner from among several exceptionally good articles. The prize-winning article, ‘It’s only money: Do voters treat human and financial sunk costs the same?’, Journal of Peace Research 53(1): 116–129, uses multiple survey experiments about a hypothetical US military intervention to evaluate the effects of sunk costs on public opinion. The authors find no evidence that sunk costs induce greater commitment to an intervention. Rather, public reaction to sunk costs is contingent on the type of costs incurred: sunk financial costs induce a desire to cut losses, while sunk costs involving US lives do not affect the public’s support for intervention. The article engages an important concept in the academic and policy worlds, shows a high degree of methodological sophistication and rigour and provides new evidence in support of an interesting proposition.