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The Conflict and Peace Data Bank Project
Abstract
As students of politics and political science, we should and we do care about the events which lead to war, instability, and international tension as well as about events which lead to equitable interdependence, integration, peace, improvement of quality of life, reduction of colonialism, and so on. Because we care about these matters, we try to advance procedures and theories about systematizing our observations and improving our skills of analysis. Recent developments in international relations have tended to (a) emphasize the exploration of more specific problems and testing of hypotheses with quantified data and (b) deemphasized the search for general theories of internation behavior. This trend appears to be undergoing slight modification for many reasons. Events contain useful information which permit a student of foreign policy to use events singularly or in the aggregate to study foreign policy outputs and inputs. A student of international systems uses events singularly or in the aggregate to study patterns, structures, and transformation. This research calls for continuously developing models and operational procedures which analyze these phenomena with faster and better numerical precision. The Conflict and Peace Data Bank Project is the contribution of myself, my students, and my colleagues to this effort.
... WEIS 1 project [30]. Subsequently, other ontologies emerged, most notably, the COPDAB 2 [31], MID 3 [32], IDEA 4 [21], ACE 5 [33], CAMEO 6 [34], TAC 7 KBP [35], ICEWS 8 [36] and PLOVER 9 [37]. Among these, one of the most popular EOs is ACE, which has been employed to a large extent by many researchers since 2004 [38][39][40][41]. ...
... "Event arguments" are entities that fill specific roles in the corresponding event trigger [42]. The general roles are time (when), location (where), source (who: the initiator of the event), target (whom: the recipient of the event) and instruments )how: with what methods( [30,31]. Also, there are many other specific roles in event ontologies such as sentence, artifact etc. ...
... During the twentieth century, two event ontologies COPDAB 12 [31] developed by Edward Azar and Charles McClelland's WEIS [45] dominated event data research. These two EOs have focused on international politics, especially official diplomacy and military threats. ...
Data is published on the web over time in great volumes, but majority of the data is unstructured, making it hard to understand and difficult to interpret. Information Extraction (IE) methods extract structured information from unstructured data. One of the challenging IE tasks is Event Extraction (EE) which seeks to derive information about specific incidents and their actors from the text. EE is useful in many domains such as building a knowledge base, information retrieval, summarization and online monitoring systems. In the past decades, some event ontologies like ACE, CAMEO and ICEWS were developed to define event forms, actors and dimensions of events observed in the text. These event ontologies still have some shortcomings such as covering only a few topics like political events, having inflexible structure in defining argument roles, lack of analytical dimensions, and complexity in choosing event sub-types. To address these concerns, we propose an event ontology, namely COfEE, that incorporates both expert domain knowledge, previous ontologies and a data-driven approach for identifying events from text. COfEE consists of two hierarchy levels (event types and event sub-types) that include new categories relating to environmental issues, cyberspace, criminal activity and natural disasters which need to be monitored instantly. Also, dynamic roles according to each event sub-type are defined to capture various dimensions of events. In a follow-up experiment, the proposed ontology is evaluated on Wikipedia events, and it is shown to be general and comprehensive. Moreover, in order to facilitate the preparation of gold-standard data for event extraction, a language-independent online tool is presented based on COfEE.
... Historically, the ontologies of the World Event/Interaction Survey (WEIS) [8] and the Conflict and Peace Databank (COPDAB) [1] have been used for large scale human coding in developing conflict datasets. While the largest coding projects, such as the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) [7] have now become fully automated there are still some projects which are entirely human coder based [6,11]. ...
... The development of any coding scheme requires expert domain knowledge and careful consideration of what data to code to ensure the coding process results in a high quality and accurate dataset. Numerous coding schemes have been developed, originally focused on international relations [8,1], and later expanded to include domestic relations and local events [3,15,5,11]. ...
... As the AfPak dataset is primarily based on news reports and is coded according to an extension of the CAMEO coding scheme, we are also able to compare supervised machine learning models to the PETRARCH Coding System. 1 In comparing supervised machine learning approaches to PETRARCH, we expect some differences in performance. First, we expect similar or better levels of recall in the supervised machine learning models compared to PETRARCH, because the supervised machine learning models operate independently of parsing rules and, given that the data were coded by human coders, we expect that the human coders did not consciously follow a subject-verb-object pattern of text extraction. ...
Constructing datasets to analyse the progression of conflicts has been a longstanding objective of peace and conflict studies research. In essence, the problem is to reliably extract relevant text snippets and code (annotate) them using an ontology that is meaningful to social scientists. Such an ontology usually characterizes either types of violent events (killing, bombing, etc.), and/or the underlying drivers of conflict, themselves hierarchically structured, for example security, governance and economics, subdivided into conflict-specific indicators. Numerous coding approaches have been proposed in the social science literature, ranging from fully automated “machine” coding to human coding. Machine coding is highly error prone, especially for labelling complex drivers, and suffers from extraction of duplicated events, but human coding is expensive, and suffers from inconsistency between annotators; thus hybrid approaches are required. In this paper, we analyse experimentally how human input can most effectively be used in a hybrid system to complement machine coding. Using two newly created real-world datasets, we show that machine learning methods improve on rule-based automated coding for filtering large volumes of input, while human verification of relevant/irrelevant text leads to improved performance of machine learning for predicting multiple labels in the ontology.
... However, most of the existing quantitative literature that uses event data to analyze the interactions between the three countries is focused on the Cold War period. Manually coded event datasets of the Conflict and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB), available from 1948 to 1978 (Azar, 1980), and the World Events Interaction Survey (WEIS), available from 1966 to the 1990s (Azar, 1980), were mostly used to quantitatively study the superpower relations, as well as the relationships between politics and trade during the Cold War period. For instance, Ward (1982), Dixon (1986), McGinnis and Williams (1989), and Goldstein (1991) utilized COPDAB and WEIS event data to explore USA-Soviet relations during the Cold War period quantitatively. ...
... However, most of the existing quantitative literature that uses event data to analyze the interactions between the three countries is focused on the Cold War period. Manually coded event datasets of the Conflict and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB), available from 1948 to 1978 (Azar, 1980), and the World Events Interaction Survey (WEIS), available from 1966 to the 1990s (Azar, 1980), were mostly used to quantitatively study the superpower relations, as well as the relationships between politics and trade during the Cold War period. For instance, Ward (1982), Dixon (1986), McGinnis and Williams (1989), and Goldstein (1991) utilized COPDAB and WEIS event data to explore USA-Soviet relations during the Cold War period quantitatively. ...
The United States, Russia and China are militarily and economically among the most powerful countries in the post-Cold War period, and the interactions between the three powers heavily influence the international system. However, different conclusions about this question are generally made by researchers through qualitative analysis, and it is necessary to objectively and quantitatively investigate their interactions. Monthly-aggregated event data from the Global Data on Events, Location and Tone (GDELT) to measure cooperative and conflictual interactions between the three powers, and the complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF) and the vector autoregression (VAR) method are utilized to investigate their interactions in two periods: January, 1991 to September, 2001, and October, 2001 to December, 2016. The results of frequencies and strengths analysis showed that: the frequencies and strengths of USA-China interactions slightly exceeded those of USA-Russia interactions and became the dominant interactions in the second period. Although that cooperation prevailed in the three dyads in two periods, the conflictual interactions between the USA and Russia tended to be more intense in the second period, mainly related to the strategic contradiction between the USA and Russia, especially in Georgia, Ukraine and Syria. The results of CCDF indicated that similar probabilities in the cooperative behaviors between the three dyads, but the differences in the probabilities of conflictual behaviors in the USA-Russia dyad showed complicated characteristic, and those between Russia and China indicated that Russia had been consistently giving China a hard time in both periods when dealing with conflict. The USA was always an essential factor in affecting the interactions between Russia and China in both periods, but China’s behavior only played a limited role in influencing the interactions between the USA-Russia dyad. Our study provides quantitative insight into the direct cooperative and conflictual interactions between the three dyads since the end of the Cold War and helps to understand their interactions better.
... In practice, some previous researchers have proposed intensity scales to rank transboundary cooperative water events 1 . The first scale to measure the international conflict or cooperation intensity between nations was the 15-point COPDAB Scale introduced by Azar (1980b) [61]: point 1 represents the most cooperative event, and point 15 represents the most conflictive one [62]. However, the most renowned scale is the BAR Scale 2 , which was developed in the Basin at Risk (BAR) project of Oregon State University to evaluate the intensity of conflict or cooperative events occurring in the period 1948 to 1999 [63]. ...
... N. P. Lan on interactions between states, involving both conflict and cooperative interactions, that can contribute to the study of cooperation over international river basins, either directly or indirectly. In addition to the Conflict and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB) 1948-1978 [61], there are some other datasets, for example, Global Event Data System introduced by the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) project and Environment and Security Water Conflict Chronology developed by Gleick (1993) [112]. However, while many of those datasets mainly focus on diplomatic and military interactions between countries, none specifically pay attention to water interactions in transboundary river basins. ...
... Creating event datasets, where the unit of observation is typically one actor performing an action directed towards another actor, has been an active area of research since at least the 1970s and continues to constitute a fruitful research program at the forefront of many methodological developments (Azar, 1980, Boschee et al., 2015, Croicu and Weidmann, 2015, Halterman et al., 2017. The use of text, often from newspapers, dominates these efforts. ...
... The earliest method, and perhaps still the most common, uses humans to extract data from text. The Conflict and Peace Databank (COPDAB) is the first large-scale project of which we are aware that codes events across countries (Azar, 1980). The World Event/Interaction Survey (WEIS) is the other large event dataset from this era (McClelland, 1984). ...
While it is understood that protester identity, violence, and emotions affect the size of protests, these concepts have proved difficult to measure at the protest-day level. Geolocated text and images from social media can improve these measurements. This advance is demonstrated on protests in Venezuela and Chile; it uncovers more protests in Venezuela and generates new measures in both countries. Moreover, the methodology generates daily city-day protest data in 107 countries containing 82.7% of the world’s population and 97.15% of its GDP. These multimodal protest event data complement existing event datasets, though countries’ population and income constrain the reach of any methodology.
... Finally, the Argument Role Classification task is to determine the role of an identified event argument. As referred by [25] in his research dated from 1980, this can be the general roles of time (when), location (where), source/actor (who: the initiator of the event), target (whom: the recipient of the event) and instruments )how: with what methods(. Also, according to ACE, there are many other specific roles for arguments such as "Buyer", "Artifact", "Victim", "Entity", "Destination", etc. ...
... One of the first attempts towards solving the problem of EE was conducted in 1960s by DARPA on WEIS 6 project [41]. Subsequently, other EE projects emerged, most notably, the COPDAB 7 [25], MID 8 [42], IDEA 9 [43], ACE 10 [44], CAMEO 11 [45], TAC 12 KBP [46], ICEWS 13 [47] and PLOVER 14 . Ultimately, the majority of the activities begun in 2004 boosted by the ACE program, which has been used to a large extent by many researchers to construct comprehensive models [26,[48][49][50]. ...
Event extraction (EE) is one of the core information extraction tasks, whose purpose is to automatically identify and extract information about incidents and their actors from texts. This may be beneficial to several domains such as knowledge bases, question answering, information retrieval and summarization tasks, to name a few. The problem of extracting event information from texts is longstanding and usually relies on elaborately designed lexical and syntactic features, which, however, take a large amount of human effort and lack generalization. More recently, deep neural network approaches have been adopted as a means to learn underlying features automatically. However, existing networks do not make full use of syntactic features, which play a fundamental role in capturing very long-range dependencies. Also, most approaches extract each argument of an event separately without considering associations between arguments which ultimately leads to low efficiency, especially in sentences with multiple events. To address the two above-referred problems, we propose a novel joint event extraction framework that aims to extract multiple event triggers and arguments simultaneously by introducing shortest dependency path (SDP) in the dependency graph. We do this by eliminating irrelevant words in the sentence, thus capturing long-range dependencies. Also, an attention-based graph convolutional network is proposed, to carry syntactically related information along the shortest paths between argument candidates that captures and aggregates the latent associations between arguments; a problem that has been overlooked by most of the literature. Our results show a substantial improvement over state-of-the-art methods.
... UCDP also provides information on precise battle deaths in inter-state armed conflicts for 2002-05. 1 9 5 0 1 9 5 4 1 9 5 8 1 9 6 2 1 9 6 6 1 9 7 0 1 9 7 4 1 9 7 8 1 9 8 2 1 9 8 6 1 9 9 0 1 9 9 4 1 9 9 8 2 0 0 2 Years Iopen Popen using force. Azar's (1980) Conflict and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB) is an extensive longitudinal collection of about one million daily events reported from forty seven newspaper sources between 1948-1978. The data set codes events into 15 broader categories representing different kinds of conflict and cooperation. ...
... TABARI dictionaries follow the CAMEO (Conflict and Mediation Event Observations) framework (Schrodt et al., 2008), which was initially intended as an extension of an ontology from the 60-70s called WEIS (McClelland, 2006). Another old ontology is COPDAB (Azar, 1980) in the 1980s. Competing modern ontologies to CAMEO are the IDEA ontology from the 2000s, and the JRC-names (Ehrmann et al., 2017) in the 2010s, developed as a by-product of the EMM (European Media Monitor) project. ...
This paper presents the conflict event modelling experiment, conducted at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, particularly focusing on the limitations of the input data. This model is under evaluation as to potentially complement the Global Conflict Risk Index (GCRI), a conflict risk model supporting the design of European Union’s conflict prevention strategies. The model aims at estimating the occurrence of material conflict events, under the assumption that an increase in material conflict events goes along with a decrease in material and verbal cooperation. It adopts a Long-Short Term Memory Cell Recurrent Neural Network on country-level actor-based event datasets that indicate potential triggers to violent conflict such as demonstrations, strikes, or elections-related violence. The observed data and the outcome of the model predictions consecutively, consolidate an early warning alarm system that signals abnormal social unrest upheavals, and appears promising as an approach towards a conflict trigger model. However, event-based systems still require overcoming certain obstacles related to the quality of the input data and the event classification method.
... Indeed, most of the databases reviewed in the next sections use the same common framework to code event data (typically used for events that merit news coverage, and generally applied to the study of political news and violence) called Conflict and Mediation Event Observations (CAMEO). 99 Other alternative codebook exist, like the World Event/Interaction Survey (WEIS) coding system (Goldstein, 1992;McClelland, 2006) and the Conflict and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB) coding system (Azar, 2009). Here a brief summary of the available on-line resources is presented although how data is generated is not explained in full detail. ...
With the consolidation of the culture of evidence-based policymaking, the availability of data has become central for policymakers. Nowadays, innovative data sources have offered opportunity to describe more accurately demographic, mobility- and migration- related phenomena by making available large volumes of real-time and spatially detailed data. At the same time, however, data innovation has brought up new challenges (ethics, privacy, data governance models, data quality) for citizens, statistical offices, policymakers and the private sector.Focusing on the fields of demography, mobility and migration studies, the aim of this report is to assess the current state of utilisation of data innovation in the scientific literature as well as to identify areas in which data innovation has the most concrete potential for policymaking. For that purpose, this study has reviewed more than 300 articles and scientific reports, as well as numerous tools, that employed non-traditional data sources for demographic, human mobility or migration research.The specific findings of our report contribute to a discussion on a) how innovative data is used in respect to traditional data sources; b) domains in which innovative data have the highest potential to contribute to policymaking; c) prospects for an innovative data transition towards systematic contribution to official statistics and policymaking.
... To construct the two variables we used the events data in the Conflict and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB). COPDAB records events as daily frequency counts in seven issue categories (Azar 1980(Azar , 1982. To create separate measures of conflict and cooperation we split the 15-point COPDAB scale in half: we used events coded 9 through 15 to construct the conflictual variable and events coded 1 through 7 to construct the cooperation variable.3 ...
... Fortunately, with the development of data science, especially the rise of big data, there are more and more data-driven approaches proposed on microscopic insight into possible social unrest events. Last century, most researchers conducted the prediction work using human-coded data, including WEIS [2] and COPDAB [3]. In the recent two decades, several small-scale vertical machine-readable datasets [4,5] and large-scale coded event data like ICEWS (Integrated Crisis Early Warning System) [6] and GDELT [7] appeared, fueling the development of computation methods for the analysis and prediction of social unrest. ...
Social unrest events are common happenings in modern society which need to be proactively handled. An effective method is to continuously assess the risk of upcoming social unrest events and predict the likelihood of these events. Our previous work built a hidden Markov model- (HMM-) based framework to predict indicators associated with country instability, leaving two shortcomings which can be optimized: omitting event participants’ interaction and implicitly learning the state residence time. Inspired by this, we propose a new prediction framework in this paper, using frequent subgraph patterns and hidden semi-Markov models (HSMMs). The feature called BoEAG (Bag-of-Event-Association-subGraph) is constructed based on frequent subgraph mining and the bag of word model. The new framework leverages the large-scale digital history events captured from GDELT (Global Data on Events, Location, and Tone) to characterize the transitional process of the social unrest events’ evolutionary stages, uncovering the underlying event development mechanics and formulating the social unrest event prediction as a sequence classification problem based on Bayes decision. Experimental results with data from five main countries in Southeast Asia demonstrate the effectiveness of the new method, which outperforms the traditional HMM by 5.3% to 16.8% and the logistic regression by 11.2% to 43.6%.
... A few years later, the Conflict and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB) (Azar, 1980), was motivated largely by new perspectives on IR research, as laid out in Zinnes (1976). Whereas McClelland resisted scaling events, the COPDAB project ranked events along a single dimension of conflict and cooperation. ...
Lewis Fry Richardson made foundational contributions to the study of international relations. In this chapter, we examine his agenda-setting impact on the study of dynamics, time, and processes, especially conflict processes. We highlight the presence of Richardsonian dynamics in various formal and empirical models of peace and conflict. In so doing we emphasize the role of feedback and interactions in Richardson’s models as well as other dynamic models, game-theoretic models, evolutionary game-theory and agent-based models, and quantitative empirical analyses. To show how these early foundations still inform research today, we then demonstrate how current research leverages dynamics to yield important insights concerning the origins and evolution of conflict such as when to expect norms of reciprocity to be present and to enable peace or exacerbate violence.
... The collection of political event data has a long history, both in the social movement (e.g., Eisinger 1973) and in the international relations literature (e.g., Azar 1980;McClelland 1976). Concerns about the validity and reliability of media data for political science research are hence not necessarily new (e.g., Danzger 1975;Franzosi 1987). ...
(Note: available in open access at publisher's website).
While conflict event data sets are increasingly used in contemporary conflict research, important concerns persist regarding the quality of the collected data. Such concerns are not necessarily new. Yet, because the methodological debate and evidence on potential errors remains scattered across different subdisciplines of social sciences, there is little consensus concerning proper reporting practices in codebooks, how best to deal with the different types of errors, and which types of errors should be prioritised. In this article, we introduce a new analytical framework—that is, the Total Event Error (TEE) framework—which aims to elucidate the methodological challenges and errors that may affect whether and how events are entered into conflict event data sets, drawing on different fields of study. Potential errors are diverse and may range from errors arising from the rationale of the media source (e.g., selection of certain types of events into the news) to errors occurring during the data collection process or the analysis phase. Based on the TEE framework, we propose a set of strategies to mitigate errors associated with the construction and use of conflict event data sets. We also identify a number of important avenues for future research concerning the methodology of creating conflict event data sets.
... The WEIS data set codes every reported event into 22 broad categories ranging from extending aid to military assaults using force. Azar's (1980) Conflict and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB) is an extensive longitudinal collection of about one million daily events reported from forty seven newspaper sources between 1948-1978. The data set codes events into 15 broader categories representing different kinds of conflict and cooperation. ...
The purpose of this paper is to examine whether greater level of international integration, increased development spending and economic growth improve relations between India and Pakistan. The analysis controls for political orientation, defence spending and population for both countries. Our results suggest that more international trade has been the primary determinant of conflict mitigation between India and Pakistan. The export capabilities of both countries are key for the peace process to move forward. We also find that India Pakistan conflict is the cause of high military expenditures and low/stagnant development expenditures in Pakistan over the Last 50 years. Another important finding of the study is that a weak relationship exists between conflict mitigation and relative political orientation of both countries. Keywords: Interstate conflict and trade, democracy and conflict, conflict and economic development.
... Την πιο συστηµατική ανάλυση των γεγονότων έχει να παρουσιάσει η έρευνα για αυτά οποία αναπτύχθηκε στην Αµερική τις δεκαετίες του 1960-70 και χρησιµοποιήθηκε για να συνδέσει την κλασσική διπλωµατική ιστορία µε την ποσοτική ανάλυση της εξωτερικής πολιτικής στην πολιτική επιστήµη (Schrodt και Gerner 2000, Schrodt 2001, Huxtable 1997) Οι πρώτες προσπάθειες συστηµατικής κωδικοποίησης των γεγονότων έγιναν απο τον Charles McClelland (1976McClelland ( ,1978 για την World Event / Interaction Survey (WEIS) και τον Edward Azar (1980Azar ( ,1982 Τα γεγονότα που καταγράφηκαν στο πλαίσιο της Ευρωπαϊκής Κοινωνικής Ερευνας παρουσιάζουν ορισµένες ιδιαιτερότητες ή χαρακτηριστικά που τα διαχωρίζουν απο άλλα ειδησεογραφικά δεδοµένα. Αναλυτικότερα τα δεδοµένα αυτά: ...
... Την πιο συστηµατική ανάλυση των γεγονότων έχει να παρουσιάσει η έρευνα για αυτά οποία αναπτύχθηκε στην Αµερική τις δεκαετίες του 1960-70 και χρησιµοποιήθηκε για να συνδέσει την κλασσική διπλωµατική ιστορία µε την ποσοτική ανάλυση της εξωτερικής πολιτικής στην πολιτική επιστήµη (Schrodt και Gerner 2000, Schrodt 2001, Huxtable 1997) Οι πρώτες προσπάθειες συστηµατικής κωδικοποίησης των γεγονότων έγιναν απο τον Charles McClelland (1976McClelland ( ,1978 για την World Event / Interaction Survey (WEIS) και τον Edward Azar (1980Azar ( ,1982 Τα γεγονότα που καταγράφηκαν στο πλαίσιο της Ευρωπαϊκής Κοινωνικής Ερευνας παρουσιάζουν ορισµένες ιδιαιτερότητες ή χαρακτηριστικά που τα διαχωρίζουν απο άλλα ειδησεογραφικά δεδοµένα. Αναλυτικότερα τα δεδοµένα αυτά: ...
... McClelland's (1978) World Events Interaction Survey (WIES) is probably the first of its kind based on bilateral interactions occurring during 1966-1992, reported in The New York Times. Azar's (1980) Conflict and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB) is an extensive longitudinal collection of about one million daily events reported from 47 newspaper sources between 1948 and 1978. Since this paper is interested in the evolution of the India-Pakistan conflict over the last 55 years, the Uppsala/PRIO and COW interstate war data set will be used instead of events-based data sets because the former data sets provide conflict data, which covers most of the period of 55 years selected for this analysis. ...
The paper analyses role of military spending and number of military personnel in India and Pakistan in conflict mitigation. The paper finds that Pakistan's military spending is a cause of deterrence from Indian hegemony in the region confirming the defence literature that puts the role of military as a strategic asset for a country. The paper also suggests that both democracy and economic development puts downward pressures on India and Pakistan hostilities however democracy is not a sufficient condition in itself to mitigate conflict. The innovation of the paper is that it constructs real proxies of conflict from the defence literature and utilizes defence spending in the analysis as a means to a peaceful resolution between bilateral issues within South Asian region.
... Hand coding also allows researchers to collect information from multiple sources to construct event records with details that may not be available from any single source. Notable hand-coded event datasets include the Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset, the International Crisis Behavior dataset, the Militarized Interstate Dispute dataset, and the Conflict and Peace Databank (Raleigh et al. 2010;Brecher and Wilkenfeld 2000;Brecher et al. 2016; Palmer et al. 2015;Azar 1980). ...
Event data provide high-resolution and high-volume information about political events and have supported a variety of research efforts across fields within and beyond political science. While these datasets are machine coded from vast amounts of raw text input, the necessary dictionaries require substantial prior knowledge and human effort to produce and update, effectively limiting the application of automated event-coding solutions to those domains for which dictionaries already exist. I introduce a novel method for generating dictionaries appropriate for event coding given only a small sample dictionary. This technique leverages recent advances in natural language processing and machine learning to reduce the prior knowledge and researcher-hours required to go from defining a new domain-of-interest to producing structured event data that describe that domain. I evaluate the method with the production of a novel event dataset on cybersecurity incidents.
... Political event data have long been used in the quantitative study of international politics, dating back to 1970s. Edward Azar's COPDAB(Conflict and Peace Data Bank) [2] and Charles McClelland's WEIS(World Event Interaction Survey) [3] are early efforts. In 1990s, two practical automated event data coding systems developed, that is the NSF-funded KEDS(Kansas Event Data System) [4] the proprietary VRA-Reader [5]. ...
... The ICEWS dataset grew out of a large body of academic research 6 on using discrete events for studying international (and domestic) relations (McClelland 1976;Azar 1980;Goldstein 1992). The results of such data collection are applicable to my coding of soft and hard power actions. ...
The soft power literature has indicated that American soft power use has been declining while Russian and Chinese soft power use has been increasing. Until now, the only way scholars could test such claims was to compare these countries' soft power rankings. This paper uses a new soft power dataset that can evaluate countries' soft power use. Using this dataset, this paper tests three hypothesis regarding China's, Russia's and the US' soft power use for the time-period of 1995-2015. The findings indicate that surprisingly the US is still using more soft power than Russia and China. The data analysis also reveals that the US is leading in economic soft power actions over China and in military soft power actions over Russia as well.
... OSINT has focused on analysing news sources since the Second World War. 32 With the coming of the Information Age, the sheer number of publications worldwide has necessitated ways of automatically extracting events from news sources, in contrast with earlier event data projects such as the World Event Interaction Survey (WEIS) 33 and the Conflict and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB) 34 that could rely on human coding. Recent projects, usually based on the Conflict and Mediation Event Observations (CAMEO) coding ontology (see below), include the Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS) maintained by Lockheed Martin, 35 Global Data on Events Language and Tone (GDELT) developed by Kalev Leetaru at Georgetown University, and Social, Political, and Economic Event Database (SPEED) maintained by the University of Illinois. ...
With the advent of the information age, Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) has gained special prominence in the Intelligence Community (IC). However, the era of big data has brought numerous challenges in handling OSINT, in particular because big data comprise large volumes of unstructured data that are generated continuously. In this article, we discuss the use of OSINT in the era of big data, in particular how it relates to compiling event data, but also show that large projects with an international focus such as the Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS) are inadequate to study political instability in the current South African context. We shift our collection efforts from mainstream media to the analysis of WhatsApp messages, since this platform has recently gained popularity and it is widely used in South Africa. We show how we build an automated data pipeline that provides near real time data on the occurrence of mass violence in South Africa. For this analysis, we make use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) toolkits in Python and build interactive dashboards to monitor the state of mass violence in South Africa.
... Gemeinsames Charakteristiken dieser Datensammlungen bildet die Erhebungseinheit eines einzelnen Ereignisses in der oben umschriebenen Form (Datum, Auslöser, Ereignistyp, Adressat, eventuell ergänzt um weitere Variablen). Die Ereignisart wird in der Regel in einem kategorialen Code für den Ereignistyp festgelegt, ausnahmsweise erfolgt auch eine numerische Erfassung (zum Beispiel in der Conflict and Peace Databank; COPDAB, vgl.Azar 1980). Weil der Ansatz seinen Ursprung in den internationalen Beziehungen hat, sind Auslöser und Adressat eines Ereignisses in der Regel Staaten oder Länder. ...
... The same is true for both data based on the Conflict and Mediation Event Observations (CAMEO) framework (Gerner, Schrodt, Yilmaz, Abu-Jabr, 2002) and the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) (Leetaru and Schrodt, 2013). These efforts, and earlier ones like the Conflict and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB) and the World/Event Interaction Survey (WEIS) (Azar, 1980), provide granular information on human behavior drawn from an immense collection of available public sources of input data. CAMEO and other frameworks are employed for the purposes of structuring and making sense of the resultant information for analytic purposes. ...
... 30 The verb as the center for analysis has figured as relevant in several content analytical works prior to the full development of OPCODE. 31 It is beyond the scope of this article to present the VICS system in its entirety, we shall at this point only carry the basics, wherein the Romanian Political Science Review vol. XX no. 4 2020 "two linguistic components, the subject and the verb, combine to form the recording unitcalled the 'utterance'-for the VICS system. ...
Slobodan Milošević, a key figure in the Yugoslav conflicts of the nineties, has been the focus of much scholarly analysis. However, we have, chosen to tackle him from the perspective of Operational Code Analysis, which is most commonly used for delving into political beliefs (dubbed "philosophical" and "instrumental" within the methodology) of political leaders. For the analysis of his Operational Code, we have coded his speeches at the Congresses of the Socialist Party of Serbia (whose president he was), which was the ruling party in Serbia during the nineties, his 1989 Kosovo Field speech (from when he rose to prominence), and his 2001 reflection on the Hague Tribunal, as the beginning and end of his political career. Furthermore, and arguably more important, is the novel approach to Operational Code Analysis, wherein it goes from its initial idea of analyzing the "inner" political beliefs of the chosen political subject to the Weltanschauung that they promulgate in practice. This is based on the switch from Platonic idealism towards Aristotle, drawing as well from Sartre, and Speech-Act theory developed by Austin and Searle. The approach has been dubbed "practical political hematology", as it functions similarly to a medical blood screening: it divulges a set of practical political beliefs not unlike the blood screening in relation to the human bodily functions.
... Internal expectations could be measured by using democracy indices, indicators for domestic opposition, and civil society involvement (see Dür and Mateo 2010). External expectations could be measured by a country's import and export demand and supply to a target country (Polachek 1997) and participation in international treaties (Azar 1980). Indicators need to be developed that differentiates between the weak actually getting what they want versus only thinking they get what they want. ...
This article proposes a re-examination of how power is conceptualized within transboundary hydropolitics by arguing that power has been misrepresented in the water resources literature. Overemphasis on the factors of a country’s relative power, riparian position, and technological potential to exploit the resource has led to assumptions that the non-hegemon(s) is often unable to achieve their own positive outcomes and that the outcomes of interactions between hegemons and non-hegemons are predictable and detrimental. However, it appears that there are many examples that run counter to the power narrative that employs these factors. This study argues that this overemphasis neglects hegemonic vulnerabilities, which, when included with hegemonic capacities, are much more instructive in explaining transboundary water dynamics. The sources of the weakness of the strong of the alleged hegemon originates from several sources, including interlinkages between water and non-water issues, internal and external expectations, and consideration of whether the water-related issue at hand is crucial to each party’s survival or whether the party has the luxury to survive the outcome of the resolution. These factors allow for non-hegemons to achieve more favorable outcomes and, when incorporated in analysis, provide a fuller picture of the true power balance in each transboundary water interaction. We therefore call for a reconceptualization of power dynamics in transboundary waters that accounts for structural weaknesses present within all parties. © 2018 Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature
... In past work, coding an event has entailed the assignment of these labels to news articles according to a set of coding rules, such as World Event/Interaction Survey (WEIS) [26] and Conflict and Mediation Event Observations (CAMEO) [27]. Coding can be performed manually by reading news articles, which is the case for WEIS [26], Conflict and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB) [28], Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project [29], and Social Conflict Analysis Database [30]. The coding process is automated in systems such as Textual Analysis by Augmented Replacement Instructions [31], which produced the GDELT database. ...
Activists have used social media during modern civil uprisings, and researchers have found that the generated content is predictive of off-line protest activity. However, questions remain regarding the drivers of this predictive power. In this paper, we begin by deriving predictor variables for individuals' protest decisions from the literature on protest participation theory. We then test these variables on the case of Twitter and the 2011 Egyptian revolution. We find significant positive correlations between the volume of future-protest descriptions on Twitter and protest onsets. We do not find significant correlations between such onsets and the preceding volume of political expressions, individuals' access to news, and connections with political activists. These results locate the predictive power of social media in its function as a protest advertisement and organization mechanism. We then build predictive models using future-protest descriptions and compare these models with baselines informed by daily event counts from the Global Database of Events, Location, and Tone (GDELT). Inspection of the significant variables in our GDELT models reveals that an increased military presence may be predictive of protest onsets in major cities. In sum, this paper highlights the ways in which online activism shapes off-line behavior during civil uprisings. IEEE
... Tidligere innholdsanalyser av hendelser som har oppstått på bakgrunn av staters handlinger, har også fokusert på egenskaper ved verb som for eksempel intensitet i konflikt, samarbeid og deltakelse på den internasjonale politiske arena (f.eks. Azar 1980;Callahan, Brady & Hermann 1982;Goldstein 1992). ...
... The intensity of interactions is mapped onto the conflict-cooperation BAR scale. This scale classifies political interactions in the manner used in other event data projects, such as the COPDAB coding procedures (Azar 1980). Event codes in our time period range from most conflictual (−5 for small-scale military acts) to most cooperative (+6 for major cooperative events such as establishing joint programs or forming strategic alliances). ...
Much of international cooperation research has long assumed that building and deepening (i.e. institutionalizing) international agreements can substitute for weak domestic bureaucratic capacity when it comes to promoting cooperative policies between countries. Qualifying this assumption, we argue that domestic bureaucracies are a key piece of international cooperation: the cooperation-inducing effect of international institutions is conditional on the quality of domestic bureaucracies. We examine this relationship in the context of the politics of interstate cooperation over transboundary rivers, an important test case given concerns about looming water conflict in face of increasing water scarcity. Using data on freshwater-related events, 1984-2006, on the level of institutionalization of river treaties, and on quality of domestic bureaucracy, we find that domestic bureaucracies moderate the ability of international institutions to elicit cooperative interstate behavior. The finding is robust to a multitude of specifications and provides important implications for institutional research and policy approaches to cooperation problems beyond freshwater.
... Basic need theories have also contributed a great deal to PACS and discussions on positive peace. Peace scholar, John Burton (1990), argued that the universal needs of human beings must be fulfilled in order to prevent or resolve conflict, and scholar Edward Azar (1980), who developed the protracted social conflict theory, 9 associated conflicts with needs such as security, identity, recognition and participation. Johan Galtung (2012) identified four basic needs of humanity: ...
People with disabilities are the largest minority in the world; a minority that continues to face high instances of direct, structural and cultural violence during times of peace, as well as during times of conflict and displacement. Exacerbating their marginalisation has been the absence of the disability community from Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) research, literature and practice, which has perpetuated ableist ideologies and hindered the pursuit of “positive peace”. This research responds to this absence by investigating the intersectionality of disability, conflict and displacement from a PACS perspective. Its purpose is two-fold. The first aim is to conduct pure research that challenges the on-going marginalisation of people affected by disability, conflict and displacement, by intentionally de-subjugating and valuing their knowledge and experiences. The second aim is to use applied research to conceptualise and demonstrate ways in which PACS might actively advance inclusive and accessible positive peace. The design of this research was strongly influenced by critical theories, the transformative paradigm, appreciative inquiry, narrative inquiry and partial-insider research. Over a period of five weeks, twenty interviews were conducted in Ecuador with refugees and asylum seekers with disabilities from Colombia and Venezuela, and their family members. A further five interviews were conducted with service providers. The key findings were simple. Participants confirmed that the intersectional experience of disability, conflict and displacement can be dangerous and harrowing. As participants shared insights into how to navigate direct, structural and cultural violence during conflict and displacement, a second key finding was that a great deal can be learned from people with lived experience. Finally, this research revealed that when PACS is informed by rights-based approaches; when those with lived experience have equitable opportunities to determine their own research agenda and contribute knowledge and expertise; and when “nothing about us, without us” is at the forefront of peacebuilding research and activities, then inclusive and accessible positive peace can begin to be realised.
... Many human-coded event datasets have been developed and maintained, which allow researchers to build forecasters at specific sub-state geographic units [86,113,140]. In the earliest days, due to technological limitations (i.e., the lack of electronic articles and computational power), the World Event Interaction Survey (WEIS) [84] and the Conflict and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB) [9] projects hire human analysts 1 Dynamic features are usually involved in civil unrest prediction studies, while static features are sometimes not considered. to physically collect newspaper clippings, press reports, and summary accounts from Western news sources to obtain news stories. ...
Population-level societal events, such as civil unrest and crime, often have a significant impact on our daily life. Forecasting such events is of great importance for decision-making and resource allocation. Event prediction has traditionally been challenging due to the lack of knowledge regarding the true causes and underlying mechanisms of event occurrence. In recent years, research on event forecasting has made significant progress due to two main reasons: (1) the development of machine learning and deep learning algorithms and (2) the accessibility of public data such as social media, news sources, blogs, economic indicators, and other meta-data sources. The explosive growth of data and the remarkable advancement in software/hardware technologies have led to applications of deep learning techniques in societal event studies. This paper is dedicated to providing a systematic and comprehensive overview of deep learning technologies for societal event predictions. We focus on two domains of societal events: \textit{civil unrest} and \textit{crime}. We first introduce how event forecasting problems are formulated as a machine learning prediction task. Then, we summarize data resources, traditional methods, and recent development of deep learning models for these problems. Finally, we discuss the challenges in societal event forecasting and put forward some promising directions for future research.
... This database is more comprehensive than the COW dataset but is less detailed regarding the specifics of each war (Gleditsch & Ward, 1999). We used the Conflict and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB) (Azar, 1980) and World Event Interaction Survey (WEIS) (McClelland, 1984) databases to supplement the data of nation-dyadic conflicts. We also used the COW Formal Interstate Alliance Data for interstate alliances with three different levels of commitment (Gibler & Sarkees, 2004). ...
Research Summary
This paper explores why and how nation‐dyadic history impacts aggregated firm decisions involving cross‐border activities (acquisitions, joint ventures, and alliances). We contextualize history and illustrate the negative effect of historical conflict on cross‐border deals. Nation‐dyads with historical conflict incorporate negative sentiments into their social and collective memories and national identities. Members of society assume the socially constructed national identity via primary and secondary socialization. National identities incorporate sentiments towards other nations and condition individuals’ preferences, culminating in a preference‐biased search for or preference‐supporting evaluation of information concerning cross‐border deals. An increased generational distance from prior conflict and a higher percentage of graduates with common professional identities constructed by higher education in the social sciences, law, and business dampen the negative influence of historical conflict.
Managerial Summary
There is a reciprocal relationship between international trade and conflict across two nations: as the potential for conflict increases, trade levels fall, and as trade levels increase, the potential for conflict rises. We disentangle this relationship and determine the implications of historical conflict between two nations for cross‐border corporate deals (i.e., acquisitions/joint ventures/alliances). We show that, controlling for other factors, more frequent historical conflict discourages cross‐border corporate deals. We see this finding as a result of biased decision making based on preferences which reflect sentiments formed by national identities. Two mechanisms dampen the negative relationship between binational conflict and cross‐border deals: a higher percentage of business/law/social sciences graduates and a higher number of generations passed since the last conflict.
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... Beyond disagreements over the classification and the appropriateness of data sources (Silke 2004, p. 61-62), using secondary sources or mixing different datasets aims "to compensate for deficiencies and gaps in the primary source" (Taylor & Hudson 1972, p. 422). In the study of domestic or cross-country violence, data very often stem from media sources that provide certain types of information on violent events (Azar et al. 1972, p. 373;Azar 1980). The usual practice was to rely on a limited number of media collections for generating event data (Jackman & Boyd 1979;Taylor & Hudson 1972). ...
The paper presents a new database (PVGR) on political violence in Greece from 2008
to 2019. PVGR monitors violent episodes reported mainly in online and printed media,
stemming both from the far right and the far left. It provides the first existing measure
of political violence in Greece for a timespan of eleven years. The uniqueness of our
database is two-fold: first, it covers both ideological kinds of extremism: right wing
and left wind; second, it registers the whole stairway of low-intensity violent
escalation, from physical attacks to terrorism. We gather data on all the internalsupply
aspects of political violence: we identify its size, the actors involved and their
ideological background, the targets. We further provide measures of frequency,
intensity, escalation and geographical distribution, which permit us to configure
political violence in crisis-ridden Greece. We find an important increase in political
violence in the period under study. We contribute to the literature of political violence
in several ways. First, we offer the first comprehensive database of political violence
in Greece. Second, we typologize evidence in analytical categories and measures, thus
contributing to the classification of the phenomenon beyond ideological doctrines.
Third, we clarify similarities and differences between the two kinds of violence, which
implies specific policy implications.
... Case 2: War damages Modeling of the evolution of national and international conflicts is a long standing strand of research (Gleditsch et al., 2014), although data collection is a very challenging task, see Arnold (2019) and Cressey (2008). Based on the comprehensive databases as COPDAB (Azar, 1980), MIDLOC (Braithwaite, 2010), or PRIO (Hallberg, 2012), main approaches still remain to be classic econometric linear ones with a list of exogenous factors or those based on the hazard models, cf. Collier et al. (2004), Schrodt (2014, Clauset (2018) and Ward et al. (2010), Harrison and Wolf (2012). ...
Forecasting costs is now a front burner in empirical economics. We propose an unconventional tool for stochastic prediction of future expenses based on the individual (micro) developments of recorded events. Consider a firm, enterprise, institution, or state, which possesses knowledge about particular historical events. For each event, there is a series of several related subevents: payments or losses spread over time, which all leads to an infinitely stochastic process at the end. Nevertheless, the issue is that some already occurred events do not have to be necessarily reported. The aim lies in forecasting future subevent flows coming from already reported, occurred but not reported, and yet not occurred events. Our methodology is illustrated on quantitative risk assessment, however, it can be applied to other areas such as startups, epidemics, war damages, advertising and commercials, digital payments, or drug prescription as manifested in the paper. As a theoretical contribution, inference for infinitely stochastic processes is developed. In particular, a non-homogeneous Poisson process with non-homogeneous Poisson processes as marks is used, which includes for instance the Cox process as a special case.
Building on the debate on engaged scholarship in project studies, this article aims to explore the extent and potential of practitioner involvement in research on projects and thereby characterise the evolution of the field through the lens of engaged scholarship. We conduct a longitudinal bibliometric analysis of 6584 articles published on projects between 1964 and 2017 to capture the volume and citation impact of publications featuring practitioner involvement in comparison to purely academic publications. The analysis identifies distinct research production patterns, allowing us to delineate and characterise three evolutionary periods in project studies: projects as an execution methodology (1964-1989), projects as an organisational concept (1990-2001), and projects as a theoretical framework (from 2002). In this way, the article enriches the ongoing debate about engaged scholarship in project studies, and discusses the endemic challenges, as well as unused potential, of actively involving practitioners in the production of research on projects.
This is an open access book. Lewis F Richardson (1981-1953), a physicist by training, was a pioneer in meteorology and peace research and remains a towering presence in both fields. This edited volume reviews his work and assesses its influence in the social sciences, notably his work on arms races and their consequences, mathematical models, the size distribution of wars, and geographical features of conflict. It contains brief bibliographies of his main publications and of articles and books written about Richardson and his work and discusses his continuing influence in peace research and international relations as well as his attitude to the ethical responsibilities of a scientist. It will be of interest to a wide range of scholars. This book includes 11 chapters written by Nils Petter Gleditsch, Dina A Zinnes, Ron Smith, Paul F Diehl, Kelly Kadera, Mark Crescenzi, Michael D Ward, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, Nils B Weidmann, Jürgen Scheffran, Niall MacKay, Aaron Clauset, Michael Spagat and Stijn van Weezel.
Lewis F Richardson occupied an important position in two academic fields as different as meteorology and peace research, with academic prizes awarded in both disciplines.
In peace research, he pioneered the use of mathematical models and the meticulous compilation of databases for empirical research.
As a quaker and pacifist, he refused to work in preparations for war, paid a heavy prize in terms of his career, and (at least in the social sciences) was fully recognized as a pioneering scholar only posthumously with the publication of two major books.
Lewis Fry Richardson is one of the 20th century’s greatest but least appreciated thinkers—a creative physicist, psychologist, meteorologist, applied mathematician, historian, pacifist, statistician, and witty stylist. If you’ve heard of weather prediction, chaos, fractals, cliometrics, peace science, big data, thick tails, or black swans, then you have benefited from Richardson’s prescience in bringing unruly phenomena into the ambit of scientific understanding. Richardson’s ideas continue to be relevant today, and this collection is a superb retrospective on this brilliant and lovable man.
Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor, Harvard University, and the author of The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now
Introduzione
La Comunità europea (CE) e la sua integrazione rappresentano un punto di svolta significativo nello sviluppo politico-internazionale dell'ultimo dopoguerra. È da anni che il complesso sistema della CE è oggetto di ricerca da parte di studiosi e, in particolare, il tema delle relazioni esterne e della politica estera della Comunità e dei suoi membri ha ricevuto notevole attenzione. In questo ambito, l'importanza delle relazioni politiche fra i membri della CE e gli Stati Uniti è ben stabilita, dato il ruolo svolto da questi nel favorire la genesi del sistema CE. Tuttavia, malgrado la rilevanza riconosciuta a questo macro-evento politico, un'analisi comportamentistica degli effetti dell'integrazione euroepa sulle relazioni euro-americane, non è stata ancora condotta.
This chapter is the personal story of how the author, just out of graduate school, encountered Richardson’s two posthumous volumes, Arms and Insecurity and Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, and how these volumes helped her resolve key issues that had troubled her. What is theory and how does it differ from a model? The first volume pushed her to learn mathematics and, through various twists and turns, eventually to an understanding of the power of a mathematically written story. The second volume provided insights into data collection and measurement as well as a deeper understanding of the mechanics of mathematical modeling. Thus, the two volumes together gave her the basis for finally answering the questions from her graduate school days.
This article seeks to explore the determinants of China-ROK relations during the period 1993–2018, employing event data and statistical analysis. The analysis found that China’s trade dependence on ROK, and vice versa, had a positive effect on China-ROK relations. The relations were also positively affected by China’s economic development. In contrast, the relations were negatively affected as China’s population aged and while conservative administrations governed ROK. The empirical findings of this article provide essential insights, identifying the factors that promote or hinder the development of cooperative China-ROK relations, suggesting guidelines to policymakers on both sides.
Event extraction (EE) is one of the core information extraction tasks, whose purpose is to automatically identify and extract information about incidents and their actors from texts. This may be beneficial to several domains such as knowledge base construction, question answering and summarization tasks, to name a few. The problem of extracting event information from texts is longstanding and usually relies on elaborately designed lexical and syntactic features, which, however, take a large amount of human effort and lack generalization. More recently, deep neural network approaches have been adopted as a means to learn underlying features automatically. However, existing networks do not make full use of syntactic features, which play a fundamental role in capturing very long-range dependencies. Also, most approaches extract each argument of an event separately without considering associations between arguments which ultimately leads to low efficiency, especially in sentences with multiple events. To address the above-referred problems, we propose a novel joint event extraction framework that aims to extract multiple event triggers and arguments simultaneously by introducing shortest dependency path in the dependency graph. We do this by eliminating irrelevant words in the sentence, thus capturing long-range dependencies. Also, an attention-based graph convolutional network is proposed, to carry syntactically related information along the shortest paths between argument candidates that captures and aggregates the latent associations between arguments; a problem that has been overlooked by most of the literature. Our results show a substantial improvement over state-of-the-art methods on two datasets, namely ACE 2005 and TAC KBP 2015.
Since the Syrian conflict has been going on for over ten years, it is often stated that the civil war in that country became protracted or intractable. In addition, the emphasis on the sectarian dimension of the conflict draws attention to the social and religious structure of the Syrian population. In spite of these characteristics of the conflict, the Syrian civil war has been rarely associated with Edward Azar's theory of protracted social conflict (PSC). This paper tries to explain the Syrian civil war with the theory of PSC that presents a multi-dimensional approach. Thus, it is argued that a crisis of legitimacy that stems from socioeconomic and sectarian imbalances triggered the civil war in Syria.
This chapter presents an overview of what is known about mediation (as of 2014) by two well-known mediation researchers. It goes into the definition, data, frequency and strategies of mediation. It also discusses particular problems, such as mediator bias and coordination between mediation efforts. Finally, it raises matters of outcomes of mediation and challenges for continued mediation research.
This study explores that CPEC is the mega driver of globalization and instrument of soft balancing and can bring economic equilibrium through development and interconnectivity to bridge parity in soft power between Indian and Pakistan , which has been mega impediment of positive peace. The study at hand had tested the framework ofInternational Economic Leverage and Its Uses,to understand the nature, magnitude and layers of Sino-Pakistan Interdependence and its implications to maintain regional balance in South Asia and address the impasse between India and Pakistan. The study reveals that regional connectivity in the shape of CPEC carries economical leverage to bring quantum of parity between India and Pakistan which can bring fourth chance as potent catalyst to address the Kashmir Issue. The degree of interdependency will have multi dimensional spillover effects, if OBOR is extended and developed in Azad Jammu and Kashmir. It has natural pessage through AJ&K, via Khunjerab, along Neelam River having a natural junction with Srinagar Rawalpindi Road at Domail, Muzaffarabad. This route has been connecting Srinagar through trade and travel since 2008, through LoC. The paper suggests that It leads to a logical sequence, where the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir from both sides of LoC is declared as 'free economic zone in five phases', keeping speedy driver of globalization in the shape of OBOR in consideration. It will be mega Kashmir centric CBM and a major catalyst of conflict resolution.
The relationship between the ROK and DPRK is bound to be affected by the two great powers—the US and China. Especially in recent decades, the power gap between the two great powers has continued to narrow. Given this, how is the geopolitical situation surrounding the Korean Peninsula shaping inter-Korean relations? This study uses event data and statistical analysis to explore the geopolitical factors that shaped inter-Korean relations from 1993 to 2019. We find that DPRK–ROK relations deteriorated as the power gap between the US and China narrowed. Also, inter-Korean relations were positive when DPRK–US relations were positive. In short, we conclude that during the shift in the US–China power distribution, maintaining positive DPRK–US relations while also managing inter-Korean relations peacefully is necessary for peace on the Korean Peninsula.
This article presents a model of arms expenditures and arms accumulation for the Soviet Union and United States from 1952-1978. It argues that contemporary superpowers do not react to the military budgets of one another in assessing the potential threat against which they must allocate military resources, i.e., in deciding upon the military budget. Rather, they respond to the relative balance of strategic and conventional military forces. A continuous time model of this process is developed and estimated. Stability analysis suggests that the system is most sensitive to the way in which comparisions of military weapons systems between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. are used to determine military expenditures. Moreover, there appear to be some instabilities in the system as a whole. Generous interpretations of the stability conditions suggest that even if the system is stable, once pushed off its stability path, it may take as long as 3000 years to return to stability.
The central aim of the paper is to state and prove a representation theorem for finite automata in terms of models of stimulus-response theory. The main theorem is that, given any connected finite automaton, there is a stimulus-response model that asymptotically becomes isomorphic to it. Implications of this result for language learning are discussed in some detail. In addition, an immediate corollary is that any tote hierarchy in the sense of Miller and Chomsky is isomorphic to some stimulus-response model at asymptote. Representations of probabilistic automata are also discussed, and an application to the learning of arithmetic algorithms is given.
In this article some problems of scaling events data are re‐examined with a focus on apparent discontinuities, particularly at the cooperation end of the scales. The authors offer some possible interpretations of the “gaps” in both the international and domestic scales, and conclude with a discussion of three strategies (paradigms) for conceptualizing a theory of cooperation.
When defining their immediate situations, people characterize themselves and others by social identities like doctor and patient, evoking sentiments that serve as guidelines for interpreting and creating events in the given situation. In particular, the assigned identities recall notions of how good, how powerful, and how lively each person is fundamentally. When events deflect feelings away from these sentiments, new events are conceived and ordinarily implemented to move feelings back toward the fundamental values. Thus, theoretically, social behavior and transient feelings form a control system with fundamental sentiments as reference signals. Interpersonal conflicts sometimes lead to events that a person cannot comprehend as sentiment confirming. This invokes redefinitions of situations, a higher order control that changes reference signals. Empirically derived formulas describing affective reactions to events have been elaborated into a mathematical model representing all of these processes. Data on a large number of social identities and behaviors have been collected to permit simulations using the model. Illustrations show that this theory of social action permits concrete, plausible analyses of social interactions, role relationships, and social reactions to deviance. Simulations of group dynamics in organizational contexts conceivably could provide guidelines for changing group functioning and for establishing social structures without historical precedent.
It is possible to construct a basic framework that potentially accommodates the interactions of all biological, biosocial, cultural and situational determinants of behavior. While specific problems will require changes of detail, a single structure of interactions for all problems increases the additive possibilities of the field, and makes feasible definition of the limits and applicability of alternative general theories. The framework should help the applied social scientist relate his suggestions to the full range of interactions.
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