Robert Brathwaite’s research while affiliated with Michigan State University and other places

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Publications (13)


Tailoring the message: A new dataset on the dyadic nature of NGO shaming in the media
  • Article

January 2025

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11 Reads

Robert Brathwaite

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Shanshan Lian

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Amanda Murdie

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Baekkwan Park

In the last decade, international relations scholarship on shaming by non-governmental organizations has grown dramatically, providing us with many insights into how country-level improvement occurs in the areas of human rights and the environment, among other issues. Using machine learning techniques, this project built an updated dataset on NGO shaming from almost 1.5 million articles in the media from 2001 to 2020. The dataset covers a wide set of organizations with goals outside of the traditional focus on human rights. Our approach will allow researchers to explicitly examine shaming as a dyadic event, occurring from a specific NGO sender to a specific country target. Using our new dataset, we first validated existing research on shaming in the current populist era and then examined how the nature of the NGO and the nature of the country jointly facilitated shaming. Our approach and dataset will be useful to both academics and to the policy community.


Substantive changes (India): English and Hindi
Substantive changes (India): English—dimensions of violence
Substantive changes (India): Hindi—dimensions of violence
Substantive changes: German 1st vote
Substantive changes: French Legislative Round 1
Deadly Influences: Evaluating the Relationship Between Political Competition and Religious Violence
  • Article
  • Publisher preview available

January 2023

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53 Reads

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1 Citation

Political Behavior

This study focuses on what is the relationship between religiously motivated violence and political competition? We are interested in understanding how increased levels of political competition can lead to outbreaks of different types of religious violence. We analyze national elections in India, France, and Germany from 2000 to 2015 and utilize a research design that uses natural language processing to examine text sources from English and foreign language media reports to create event-data to test our claims regarding the relationship between political competition and religious violence. Our findings indicate that political competition influences the propensity for religious violence in some of these states but not all and that incorporating foreign language media sources provides significant benefits, especially regarding the occurrence of religious violence that is non-lethal in nature.

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Measurement and Conceptual Approaches to Religious Violence: The Use of Natural Language Processing to Generate Religious Violence Event-Data

June 2018

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82 Reads

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6 Citations

Politics and Religion

How do we measure religious violence? This study is focused on utilizing new methodological approaches and data sources to measure religiously motivated violence. Previous attempts to measure religious violence concentrated on coding U.S. State Department International Religious Freedom reports or utilizing existing datasets on armed conflict/civil wars. These previous attempts provided state-level data of the levels of religiously motivated violence, but due to data limitations cannot provide more fine-grained measures of specific acts of violence tied to religious motivation. In particular, accounting for varying levels of intensity especially in regards to non-lethal acts of religiously motivated violence is missing. This study builds upon previous attempts focusing on the creation of more fine-grained measures and accounting for its variation at the sub-national level utilizing natural language processing. The data generated are used to examine incidences of reported religious violence in India from 2000 to 2015.


Dirty war: chemical weapon use and domestic repression

August 2016

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16 Reads

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1 Citation

Defence Studies

The utilization of chemical weapons to quash domestic rebellion is a drastic action for a regime facing domestic challengers to take, especially given the reputation costs and risk of international intervention. However, recent developments have illustrated that some regimes have contemplated and implemented extraordinary measures (including the use of chemical munitions) to quash rebellion. This study addresses the question of why some states utilize chemical weapons against domestic challengers while others refrain from this level of state repression. I argue that the utilization of chemical weapons has both domestic and international elements. Specifically, that ethnic cleavages that lead to secessionist challenges and factors associated with inter-state rivalry impact the likelihood that a state utilizes the employment of chemical munitions. I test my argument and other explanations regarding repression with a casestudy approach utilizing captured Iraqi Government documents comparing Iraq’s Al-Anfal campaigns with developments during the recent Syrian Civil War.


Refugees and rivals: The international dynamics of refugee flows

July 2016

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104 Reads

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27 Citations

Conflict Management and Peace Science

Intra-state violence in Syria, Myanmar, Sudan and other locales has generated an unprecedented level of refugee movement. Although extant scholarship has examined the origins of refugee flows and their implications for political violence, our understanding of why countries receive refugees is less understood. Typically, most explanations focus on the host state’s ability to absorb the economic and security costs that refugees generate. We argue that transnational factors associated with rivalry and alliances, particularly characterizing the relationship between the refugee-producing country and the potential host, impact the type of refugee groups we observe in a destination state. We posit that interstate rivalry and alliance arrangements influence the domestic cost calculus of a host state about receiving refugee groups originating from certain countries. A large-n analysis of refugees for the years 1951–2008 shows strong support for our predictions that a country is likely to receive refugees fleeing its rivals and is reluctant to accept refugees originating from its contiguous allies.



The Electoral Terrorist: Terror Groups and Democratic Participation

January 2013

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225 Reads

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20 Citations

Why do some terrorist groups participate in the electoral process but not others? If elections provide some strategic or tactical benefit then we would expect other groups to emulate that strategy. However, we see variation in the adoption of an electoral strategy by terrorist groups. I argue that involvement in territorial disputes and group competition determine whether terrorist groups embrace an electoral strategy. Conflicts involving territorial disputes are more likely to see terrorist groups contest elections because electoral participation may aid in the creation of the independent or autonomous territory they desire. Increased group competition changes the number of actors, which impacts the level and distribution of resources (supporters, finance, and arms) involved in the conflict. When multiple terrorist groups compete, groups are motivated to participate in elections in response to new competitive pressures. This argument is tested using a large-n dataset of 89 terrorist groups in existence during the years 1968–2006 and a case study of Hamas's decision to contest elections.


Reconceptualizing Church and State: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of the Impact of Separation of Religion and State on Democracy

August 2011

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75 Reads

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30 Citations

Politics and Religion

This article argues that the relationship between democracy and the separation of religion and state needs to be reexamined. We argue that previous studies have misconceptualized the impact that a lack of church-state separation can have on democracy, or have taken a narrow focus by concentrating on specific cases. We use principal component analysis and a large-n data set covering 125 countries to show that the separation of religion and state should be conceptualized multi-dimensionally and that it should be considered a component of democracy. Our findings show that as separation of religion and state increases, the level of democracy also increases.


Reconceptualizing Church and State

March 2010

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32 Reads

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1 Citation

In this article, we address the need to reconceptualize the relationship between democracy and the separation of religion and state. We argue that previous studies have misconceptualized the impact religion can have on democracy, or have taken a narrow focus by concentrating on specific cases. We use principle component analysis and a large-n dataset covering 125 countries to show that the separation of religion and state should be conceptualized multi-dimensionally and that it should be considered a component of democracy. Our findings also show that as separation of religion and state increases the level of democracy also increases.


Citations (7)


... Using dictionaries to identify events has several advantages: dictionaries are technically simple to implement, easy to interpret, and very fast to run over large corpora of text. Some event types and actors are easily identified using a small number of unique patterns, making dictionaries a useful tool for custom event datasets that are narrowly focused on a small number of actors and discrete events such as military offensives in Syria (Halterman, 2019a), rebel-government violence in Chechnya (Toft and Zhukov, 2015), or communal violence in India (Brathwaite and Park, 2018). ...

Reference:

Creating Custom Event Data Without Dictionaries: A Bag-of-Tricks
Measurement and Conceptual Approaches to Religious Violence: The Use of Natural Language Processing to Generate Religious Violence Event-Data
  • Citing Article
  • June 2018

Politics and Religion

... In the third strand, linkages between arms trade and other institutional and macroeconomic factors are oriented towards, inter alia: dependence in arms transfer and conflict in foreign policy (Kinsella, 1998); the US rhetoric against arms trade in the enhancement of democracy and human rights in developing countries (Blanton, 2000); instruments of repression in the light of arms import and human rights in developing countries (Blanton, 1999); global arms trade and regional security complexes (Kinsella, 2001); analysis of the evolving structure of arms trade (Kinsella, 2003); connections between military balances, arms transfer and interstate relations (Sanjian, 2003); nexuses between US arms transfer, democracy and human rights (Blanton, 2005); comparative analysis on the effects of US versus Chinese arms transfers (De Soysa & Midford, 2012); insights into associations between international reputation, human rights and arms exports (Erickson, 2015); geostrategic aims of arms trade and strategic choices between buying versus making weapons (Blank & Levitzky, 2015;Bağcı & Kurç, 2016); chemical weapons use, domestic repressions and growing tendencies in nuclear weapons delivery systems (Brathwaite, 2016;Wasson & Bluesteen, 2018). ...

Dirty war: chemical weapon use and domestic repression
  • Citing Article
  • August 2016

Defence Studies

... Most importantly, it does not cover what we term the "international" frame and the associated arguments. For example, we know from other research that the admission of refugees can also be related to considerations of foreign policy, as admitting refugees implies stigmatizing the refugee-sending country as breaching fundamental human rights (Abdelaaty, 2021;Blair et al., 2022;Moorthy & Brathwaite, 2019). Our typology takes into account these considerations related to admitting refugees and asylum seekers more specifically. ...

Refugees and rivals: The international dynamics of refugee flows
  • Citing Article
  • July 2016

Conflict Management and Peace Science

... More recent applications of this theory suggest that social and cultural pressures fuel government actions that result in increased religious persecution and reduced freedoms (Grim and Finke 2011;Finke and Martin 2014;Fox 2016), even in democracies (Brathwaite 2015). Moreover, qualitative research and formal reports offer numerous examples of how these pressures influence the state's treatment of religions (Sanasarian 2000;Fox 2004;Richardson 2004;Jahangir 2009;Marshall 2008;Sarkissian 2009;U.S. ...

Social Distortion: Democracy and Social Aspects of Religion-State Separation
  • Citing Article
  • May 2013

Journal of Church and State

... However, even in this case, and even though Hamas remains a deadly terrorist organization to this day, they have also shifted course, increasingly viewing contesting elections as a viable approach for achieving at least some of its goals. 72 Similar patterns can be seen in the case of the Philippines, in which the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) rose up, and began a campaign of deadly terrorism, following the Moro National Liberation Front's (MNLF) negotiations with the government. However, while there have been ups and downs, the MILF has similarly shown increased interest in negotiations, and although some members have left for groups such as Al-Qaeda, the organization has at various points in time changed direction. ...

The Electoral Terrorist: Terror Groups and Democratic Participation
  • Citing Article
  • January 2013

... Liberals value individual freedoms over socialist or organic group identities typical of conservatism. According to the liberal philosophy, religious freedom is more important than the church itself, and before worrying about good church-state relations they are concerned with boosting the negative side of religious freedom (Brathwaite and Bramsen 2011). Like any secular right, religious freedom is itself stripped of any spiritual dimension (Milbank 2017). ...

Reconceptualizing Church and State: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of the Impact of Separation of Religion and State on Democracy
  • Citing Article
  • August 2011

Politics and Religion