Shahryar Minhas

A new approach to analyzing coevolving longitudinal networks in international relations

Previous models of international conflict have suffered two shortfalls. They tend not to embody dynamic changes, focusing rather on static slices of behavior over time across a single relational dimension. These models have also been empirically evaluated in ways that assumed the independence of each country, when in reality they are searching for the interdependence among all countries. A number of approaches are available now for analyzing relational data such as international conflict in a network context and a number of these can even handle longitudinal relational data, but none are developed to the point of exploring how networks can coevolve over time. We illustrate a solution to the limitations of existing approaches and apply this novel, dynamic, network based approach to study the dependencies among the ebb and flow of daily international interactions using a newly developed, and openly available, database of events among nations.

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.

Enemy at the Gates: Variation in Economic Growth from Civil Conflict

There has been much disagreement about the relationship between civil wars and state economic performance. While civil war is often associated with poor economic performance, some states have managed robust growth despite periods of domestic armed conflict. We find this disagreement results from not accounting for the spatial distribution of conflict within a country. A robust literature in economics stresses the role major cities play in economic growth. We hypothesize that the economic impact of civil conflict is contingent on the conflict’s location relative to major urban centers within a state. We use subnational data on the location of conflict relative to urban areas to test the impact of domestic conflict on annual gross domestic product growth. In doing so, we bridge the economic development literature on the importance of cities with extant literature on the effect of armed conflict to provide a novel explanation for the paradox of high macroeconomic growth in conflict-ridden countries.

When Do States Say Uncle? Network Dependence and Sanction Compliance

ABSTRACT In this article we address the long-debated question of when and why states comply with sanctions. While the literature remains indeterminate as to whether the key mechanisms driving sanction compliance are tied to interstate relations, intrastate constraints, or a dynamic combination of the two, our theoretical framework and methodological approach provide a novel perspective that incorporates insights drawn from network theory to explain the time until countries comply. Specifically, we argue that reciprocity, a concept with deep roots in both network theory and international relations, has largely been overlooked in the study of sanction compliance. Though often ignored, this concept captures an essential aspect of how cooperation is fostered in the international system and allows us to better analyze the strategic environment underlying sanctioning behavior. Given the theoretical importance of reciprocity in understanding interstate relations, we provide an approach that integrates estimations of this type of network interdependency into extant frameworks for modeling the time until countries comply with sanctions. Our results highlight that reciprocity not only has a substantive effect in explaining the duration of sanctions but that models excluding this concept from their specifications do notably worse in terms of their predictive performance.

Mining texts to efficiently generate global data on political regime types

We describe the design and results of an experiment in using text-mining and machine-learning techniques to generate annual measures of national political regime types. Valid and reliable measures of countries’ forms of national government are essential to cross-national and dynamic analysis of many phenomena of great interest to political scientists, including civil war, interstate war, democratization, and coups d’état. Unfortunately, traditional measures of regime type are very expensive to produce, and observations for ambiguous cases are often sharply contested. In this project, we train a series of support vector machine (SVM) classifiers to infer regime type from textual data sources. To train the classifiers, we used vectorized textual reports from Freedom House and the State Department as features for a training set of prelabeled regime type data. To validate our SVM classifiers, we compare their predictions in an out-of-sample context, and the performance results across a variety of metrics (accuracy, precision, recall) are very high. The results of this project highlight the ability of these techniques to contribute to producing real-time data sources for use in political science that can also be routinely updated at much lower cost than human-coded data. To this end, we set up a text-processing pipeline that pulls updated textual data from selected sources, conducts feature extraction, and applies supervised machine learning methods to produce measures of regime type. This pipeline, written in Python, can be pulled from the Github repository associated with this project and easily extended as more data becomes available.