Project Mentor
Dr. Michael Rubin
Department: Political Science; Human Rights Institute
Research Project Overview:
Civil wars around the world have yielded tremendous destruction to societies and produced egregious human rights violations; civilian-targeted violence and collective punishment, mass killing and genocide, forced displacement, violation of civil and political liberties, and denial of basic human needs such as access to water, food, and shelter. Civil war is, at its core, a competition “for control between a government and its competitors over civilians and the territory upon which they reside” (A. M. Arjona, Kasfir, and Mampilly 2015, 1). Thus, belligerents’ territorial control and the ways in which they govern civilian populations are fundamental to understanding civil wars. Scholars have demonstrated the central role that territorial control plays in explaining subsequent conflict processes, including intensity and duration of armed conflict, the quality and durability of peace, recruitment into armed groups, and, critically, patterns of human rights abuses such as the strategic use of civilian-targeted violence.
Yet, despite the vast literature examining the local dynamics of conflict and human rights, to date little effort has been devoted to explaining why and under what conditions armed groups control territory in some locations, and at certain times, but not others. While a burgeoning research agenda has turned attention to understanding how rebels and other nonstate actors govern populations under their control, data limitations have limited our scope of understanding.
This research project seeks to fill this gap. Under what conditions do rebel organizations control territory during armed conflict? Why does rebel territory expand during certain periods of conflict and contract in others? How and why do rebel organizations vary their governance of civilian populations in the context of armed conflict? I advance a civilian agency theory to explain variation in belligerent territorial control during civil war; emphasizing how civilians influence the expansion and contraction of insurgency, on the one hand, and the consolidation of state authority, on the other hand, during civil war.
To adequately explain the causes and consequences of belligerent territorial control and governance, we must first be able to measure these concepts systematically within conflict zones. The first stage in the project is aimed at addressing the limitations existing measures of subnational variation in rebel territorial control. It develops and executes a method to measure subnational variation in rebel territorial control within conflict zones and its changes over time. The process is replicable, and facilitates systematic comparison, across conflicts. First, we identify indications of nonstate actors’ territorial control and governance in text (news, NGO and government reports, etc. from the conflict zone). We will then train a machine learning model on our annotated data to automate the process of identifying the indicators and locations of nonstate actors’ territorial control and governance in new (non-annotated) text sources. These models will allow us to extract data from a much larger set of texts than we could feasibly code by hand.
Role of a SHARE Summer Apprentice:
The research apprentice will support two key data collection pillars critical to the project. The research apprentice will annotate a news article from a set of conflict cases to identify evidence of nonstate actors’ territorial control and governance activities in specific locations. Through this process, the research apprentice will grapple with the challenges associated with collection systematic data on complex social phenomena, learning strategies and best practices to relate the information we observe to the core concepts we seek to measure. This reveals the importance and the challenges of good conceptual development and definition, and how this feeds into operationalization and the development (and refining) of a measurement strategy through data collection.
Second, the research apprentice will aid in collecting primary and secondary sources to form the basis of qualitative case studies designed to explore the mechanisms proposed to explain the origins of belligerent territorial control (in the book) and its effect on human rights conditions in armed conflict. The main cases examined in these projects are the anti-Apartheid resistance struggle in South Africa, the communist insurgency in the Philippines, and civil wars in Syria and Myanmar. This activity will provide the research apprentice the opportunity to refine skills in critical reading, qualitative research methods, and to learn about conflict processes in important episodes of political violence and civil war relevant to current and future policymaking and human rights action.
The project will involve a brief initial training period to introduce the SHARE apprentice to the research project and data collection procedures. The training period and subsequent meetings will include explanation of the goals of the research project, how the specific data collection procedures support the project, and will elicit critical feedback and engagement from the SHARE apprentice to improve the data collection procedures. In this way, the SHARE apprentices are invited to engage critically to shape the strategy and execution of the research project for deeper learning of research design and implementation skills.
Summer Schedule/Time Commitment:
While a regular schedule (for example 5-10 hours per week) is a useful baseline, the scheduling is very flexible to accommodate the student researcher’s other summer activities. There are no specific days in which the student researcher would need to work, but we would schedule regular meetings (weekly or bi-weekly) to examine issues and questions that come up in the data collection process. Meeting times and intervals will be agreed upon to accommodate the student’s schedule.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Ability to operate a computer and search the internet.
- Ability to work independently and as part of a team.
- Excellent communication skills (written and oral) and well organized.
- Willingness to provide regular progress updates and provide constructive feedback on the research process.
- Ability to attend regular meetings over video (preferably Zoom).
- Basics of Microsoft Excel, Google’s G-Suite (Docs, Sheets).
- Experience collecting, organizing, and/or analyzing quantitative data.
- Substantive and academic interest in understanding political violence, conflict processes, or related phenomena.
- Coursework related to social science research methods
To Apply:
The application deadline has passed.
Please note:
All students hired for a SHARE Summer apprenticeship must complete a federal I-9 form and present original documents in person to OUR staff as part of the hiring process. Visit this U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services page for more information about acceptable documents. You cannot begin working until this is complete. Students are encouraged to plan ahead for this. For example, if you are going home for spring break, consider bringing documents back to campus with you.