Kristian Skrede Gleditsch’s research while affiliated with University of Essex and other places

Abstracts This research note introduces a new dataset—the Governmental Incompatibilities Data Project (GIDP) 2.0—which identifies the presence of incompatibilities over governments for all countries in the world from 1960 to 2020. Incompatibilities over government involve organizations making maximalist claims related to the legitimacy of elections, the composition of the national government, or regime change. GIDP 2.0 includes information about which of these claims is present in each incompatibility year. These data can facilitate analyses of the onset, dynamics, and outcomes of both civil war and nonviolent campaigns, improve our ability to predict their occurrence, and allow for analysis of whether international efforts to prevent violent conflicts over government are effective. We present a series of descriptive analyses showing that governmental incompatibilities are common but not ubiquitous, and occur across time periods, and within and across regime types. These descriptive analyses further show interesting variation among the types of claims articulated in democracies, autocracies, and anocracies and across different types of autocratic institutions. A brief two-stage analysis shows that some factors commonly included in studies of armed conflict and nonviolent campaign onset have different effects on the emergence of governmental incompatibilities and on whether these incompatibilities escalate to mass mobilization.

Governmental and nongovernmental organizations have increasingly relied on early-warning systems of conflict to support their decisionmaking. Predictions of war intensity as probability distributions prove closer to what policymakers need than point estimates, as they encompass useful representations of both the most likely outcome and the lower-probability risk that conflicts escalate catastrophically. Point-estimate predictions, by contrast, fail to represent the inherent uncertainty in the distribution of conflict fatalities. Yet, current early warning systems are preponderantly focused on providing point estimates, while efforts to forecast conflict fatalities as a probability distribution remain sparse. Building on the predecessor VIEWS competition, we organize a prediction challenge to encourage endeavours in this direction. We invite researchers across multiple disciplinary fields, from conflict studies to computer science, to forecast the number of fatalities in state-based armed conflicts, in the form of the UCDP ‘best’ estimates aggregated to two units of analysis (country-months and PRIO-GRID-months), with estimates of uncertainty. This article introduces the goal and motivation behind the prediction challenge, presents a set of evaluation metrics to assess the performance of the forecasting models, describes the benchmark models which the contributions are evaluated against, and summarizes the salient features of the submitted contributions.

The 60th anniversary of the Department of Government at the University of Essex provides an opportunity to reflect on its many achievements and why these have been possible. This article argues that research excellence is a collective outcome that cannot be reduced to individuals. Research institutions tend to be successful because they manage to create productive environments, which can make individual scholars better and create synergies. The thesis is backed up by examples from the history of the department and more general research on the role of environments for research. The article considers possible insights with regard to present challenges to academic institutions, why productive environments can be difficult to maintain, and how we can try to nurture them.

Although very large wars remain an enduring threat in global politics, we lack a clear understanding of how some wars become large and costly, while most do not. There are three possibilities: large conflicts start with and maintain intense fighting, they persist over a long duration, or they escalate in intensity over time. Using detailed within-conflict data on civil and interstate wars 1946--2008, we show that escalation dynamics -- variations in fighting intensity within an armed conflict -- play a fundamental role in producing large conflicts and are a generic feature of both civil and interstate wars. However, civil wars tend to deescalate when they become very large, limiting their overall severity, while interstate wars exhibit a persistent risk of continual escalation. A non-parametric model demonstrates that this distinction in escalation dynamics can explain the differences in the historical sizes of civil vs. interstate wars, and explain Richardson's Law governing the frequency and severity of interstate conflicts over the past 200 years. Escalation dynamics also drive enormous uncertainty in forecasting the eventual sizes of both hypothetical and ongoing civil wars, indicating a need to better understand the causes of escalation and deescalation within conflicts. The close relationship between the size, and hence the cost, of an armed conflict and its potential for escalation has broad implications for theories of conflict onset or termination and for risk assessment in international relations.

In this forum article, we examine the state of the field of Peace and Conflict Studies in providing a platform to incorporate local knowledge to generate global insights. Many scholars in peace and conflict studies have traditionally relied on cross-national empirical analyses to investigate conflict dynamics, which can present opportunities for increased level of collaboration, methodological advancement, and interdisciplinary works. Whereas Western-oriented institutions and approaches serve as the locomotive of the production in the field, the vast majority of their data locates in non-Western contexts with diverse cultural, political, social, linguistic, and economic settings. Hence, the overarching theme of this forum emphasizes the benefits of an empirically-driven, methodologically rigorous research agenda that strongly incorporates local knowledge. We offer a platform to discuss the limits and prospects of Global North- South cooperation, the challenges of gathering dependable data, and the ways to overcome these issues while maintaining academic integrity and deepening our understanding of conflict dynamics. We believe that sustained investment in collaborative partnerships and capacity-building initiatives will be critical for unlocking the full potential of local expertise and insights in advancing knowledge-production and fostering peace and stability in conflict-affected areas.

This draft article outlines a prediction challenge where the target is to forecast the number of fatalities in armed conflicts, in the form of the UCDP `best' estimates, aggregated to the VIEWS units of analysis. It presents the format of the contributions, the evaluation metric, and the procedures, and a brief summary of the contributions. The article serves a function analogous to a pre-analysis plan: a statement of the forecasting models made publicly available before the true future prediction window commences. More information on the challenge, and all data referred to in this document, can be found at https://viewsforecasting.org/research/prediction-challenge-2023.

We argue that community deprivation can increase the risk of right-wing radicalization and violent attacks and that measures of local deprivation can help improve forecasting local hate crime rates. A large body of research stresses how experiences of deprivation can erode the perceived legitimacy of political leaders and institutions, increase alienation, and encourage right-wing radicalization and hate crime. Existing analyses have found limited support for a close relationship between deprivation and radicalization among individuals. We provide an alternative approach using highly disaggregated data for England and show that information on local deprivation can improve predictions of the location of right-wing hate crime attacks. Beyond the ability to predict where right-wing hate crime is likely, our results suggest that efforts to decrease deprivation can have important consequences for political violence, and that targeting structural facilitators to prevent far-right violence ex ante can be an alternative or complement to ex post measures.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a dramatic influence on mortality and public health and generated much speculation on potential impacts on international politics. Fast-moving crises such as the COVID pandemic and 2008 financial crises entail many challenges for scholarship; events evolve rapidly, our prior knowledge base is limited, it is unclear whether existing theories or analogies apply, and new research findings emerge quickly but also erratically. Researchers face demands to engage with policy and general audiences when normal standards of scholarship may be difficult to apply. Crises can also have a dramatic impact on how we conduct research and interact with other scholars. The forum introduction outlines how crises pose challenges for scholarship and policy and the value of approaching crises such as COVID-19 in comparative perspective. Milner highlights the important differences between the immediately observable short-term impact of crises and the more difficult to evaluate long-run impacts. Kneuer examines how crises can impact political change, detailing how COVID countermeasures can serve as a pretext for autocratization and the safeguards afforded by institutions. Solingen examines the impact of serial crises on global value chains and the difficulties in tracing impacts when crises are compounded. De Alba-Ulloa documents how scholars in the Global South and North face similar challenges during the COVID pandemic, but differences in resources to mitigate can exacerbate inequalities. Davies highlights the difficulties in studying public opinion during COVID and need for behavioral data to understand global health emergencies. Ghosn examines dilemmas in interacting with severely affected communities during crises and offers advice on better practices.

The COVID 19 pandemic has generated much interest in the relationship between research and policy. It has drawn new attention to the limitations of a linear model, where policy is based on first observing prior scientific research and then designed in response to this. Conflict researchers often motivate the importance of their work by claiming that their “research has important policy implications”, but the proposals offered are often at best incomplete. I identify a number of common limitations in claims about policy implications, including a lack of discussion of objectives and priorities, stating objectives themselves as if they were policies, claims about targeting factors without discussing the effectiveness of possible interventions, and a failure to consider uncertainty and potential tensions with other objectives or unintended effects. Research can potentially inform policy discussions and improve decisions, but the incentives in academic research are very different from policy decisions, and the latter often calls for very different evidence than what is offered by the former. Rather than attempting to offer policy prescriptions as an afterthought to academic articles, research can be more helpful to policy by trying to inform debates, focusing on what we know from the cumulative body of research than individual manuscripts, and providing new data and empirical material that allow for better problem description and analysis.

In many American Indian nations the security situation is dire. While scholars have studied how institutions shape economic development in American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) nations, the role of AIAN institutions for security and violent crime has received much less attention—despite the extensive literature highlighting the important role of effective and legitimate institutions in the long‐term decline of violence. We analyze how varying types of American Indian polities and judiciary institutions fare in tackling violent crime using data across 146 American Indian polities. Our findings indicate that more autonomous American Indian criminal justice institutions with specialized court systems are associated with lower violent crime. However, customary justice institutions do not appear to be effective in reducing violent crime, highlighting the problem of cultural mismatch between traditional and formal justice systems. We argue that analyzing AIAN nations provides important insights into how institutional legitimacy can shape violent crime.