Okay. So today I would like to present some preliminary findings and steps towards quantifying conflict, perform five dimensions.
So first, I would like to talk a bit about protracted conflicts and why they are actually so specific and complicated.
Then I would like to look at current quantitative approaches and discuss look a
bit how well they are equipped to assess and analyse those type of conflicts.
And from the title, you can already say that I'm a little bit much happier about how they deal with them.
So we try to offer a solution for this, which to certain extent brings micro-level conflict analyses and micro-level conflict analysis together.
So in some of the set, my, my, my job and conflict platform is basically to quantify those five dimensions.
And when I started thinking about that, I realised, well, if I want to quantify which actors are involved,
which methods are using conflict and we want to go beyond the state borders,
I actually need to know where the conflict is, where the violence is happening, but I don't have the guidance of the state borders.
So I realised that you need to actually create a new geographical unit which more accurately portrays conflicts,
sometimes called quantitative conflict research, as they call it, conflict zones.
So and as I mentioned, that we get protracted conflicts and actually we have 1040 cases which we use for analysis,
for searching, for patterns of change in conflict, and we try to pin up cases.
Some of them are protracted conflicts according to definition of International Red Cross.
And three, Mexico, Nigeria and Ukraine. They are conflicts with the potential becoming to become protracted.
So what is essentially a protracted conflict?
There's is a quote from International Red Cross which says that typically involve a tangled history
of several different and sometimes simultaneous conflicts means that it might start as one,
but suddenly it's at some point it mutated.
It creates new, complicated swallows and other conflicts, etc., etc.
And the complexity the complexity of those protracted conflict is often given by the longevity and intractability.
So that complex lots of factors are involved and they last very long.
So there and now I would like to talk about a few specific characteristics which
can make actually quantitative analyses of those type of complex really difficult.
So for example, there's often change of the main conflict issue.
So if you look, for example, at one of our focus, Horn of Africa,
we can see that the conflict in Somalia or one of Africa started actually with the Somali is the satisfaction with the borders.
After they got independence, they started civil border conflicts with Kenya and Ethiopia.
So it was international, basically a conflict. But then the escalation of those conflicts led to the ousting of the president of the Somali president,
in part because it led to increase of the opposition through to this autocratic rule.
There was no central power. Then once you started fighting more and more for resources and power and this this
vacuum was actually grabbed by some Islamist groups and left to Islamist insurgency,
we could see I see you then, al-Shabab, etc., etc., and the rise of the Islamist at some point.
Let's also do some interventions from out of state.
If you look at databases, you would see all those things as a separate conflict in most of the situations.
Right. But essentially it's a one conflict which is very long and very complicated.
There's another thing, those conflicts, they often change their location.
So here we have a Boko Haram activity or Boko Haram ensure against that.
Adults here, those are basically violent events that win the battle, for example, and this is 2009, basically the start of the insurgency here.
And here we have Nigeria. Then we can hope that in 2011 the conflict expanded.
Right? In 2014, we see some actors in the conflict and we see that the conflict is moving more towards the borders.
And you can actually see that it's getting to come. Everyone here in 2016, we see that the conflict is much smaller this way.
More actors and it's crossing borders even more.
Right. Another thing, borders.
It's not only that the conflicts are changing their locations, but they are very often freely crossing the borders.
Briefing open borders are something which contacts people specific often, but not not, not really often.
And especially in the areas where we see those protracted conflicts, the borders are very often arbitrary, they are social construct.
And for example, in Africa, very often we start with the colonial history.
So people tend to ignore them. The local people, you can see a lot of smuggling of people, guns, goods, etc., and people challenge them.
A lot of a lot of movements trying to secede from their states actually starts in borderland borders of border regions.
They say they are now often safe havens because the authority of the states are very often limited, because they are very remote.
And a lot of things which I would like to mention and which makes the quantitative analyses very complicated,
is that lots of protracted conflicts but also other conflicts, they create new conflicts.
So for example, if you look at the one of our focuses, Myanmar, we see there is lots of rebel groups.
Right. And for example, kind of the groups, I think the central government of Myanmar,
they often rely on on the support of current refugees who reside often in Thailand.
Right. But the Myanmar government doesn't really like that much,
that Thailand essentially provides a safe haven and some resources to the rebels fighting them.
So in 2010, 2012, we could see some border skirmishes because of that issue.
We can see also escalation of the old conflict. In 1994, after the genocide in Rwanda, a lot of Hutus, they fled to surrounding countries.
Many of them went to Zaire or from the Democratic Republic of Congo of Rwanda.
One, the government wanted to prosecute those people who committed genocide because many of those refugees,
very few of the members of the militia, but the president of Zaire, Mobutu, he didn't want to do that.
So Rwandan government started arming the local Tutsis inside and also enlisted Laurent Kabila to fight against the go against desire.
President, of course, was what the president was autocratically autocratic presidents who faced opposition before him were protest.
There were deaths. So we could say that we could see before a violent political conflict.
But what happened after enlisting Kabila? That was one of the bloodiest war in Africa.
Right. Just to wrap it up, we can see that the protracted conflict, they often mutate.
They changed their original contested issue. That's that's why it's very hard to track that in a lot of databases.
Then they changed location from one part to another, which might be difficult to actually find out the the geographical variables,
which can affect, for example, how long the conflict is.
And then they cross the borders, which very often means that in quantitative databases, they are actually assigned or listed as a different conflict,
because conflicts are very often split based on on the state location or made location in the state.
And then it creates conflicts, conflicts which are often perceived as unrelated.
Right. So let's have a look how the current approaches tackle those issues.
So very often when you look at quantitative analyses of states, we come to this analysis of conflicts,
especially now that you have a state you think would see that the state was the unit of analysis.
But we know that conflicts are usually limited to one of the central parts of states.
Right. And they do not respect borders.
We know, for example,
from wealth and we are aware that the state level that such as GDP per capita population density are very different in those zones of conflict.
Then if you look at the average level of those of those are at.
Then we could see at some point that some research is starting from on box states that look what is inside.
They try to look who reveals which ethnic groups, which ethnic groups are more prone to rebellion, more prone to challenge to the state.
But again, they just opened the box, but they didn't go beyond the borders.
Now, ethnic relationships, they are trying to they actually have a database of cross-border ethnic ties, which is a nice offer.
But still there is the border which separates ethnic groups.
So then you have, of course the Kurds and you have four or five ethnic groups in the database,
but they are Kurds and it's sometimes difficult and analyses to put the link together.
Then you see this research is focussed on actors, on specific actors, usually armed groups,
and they look at how certain characteristics of those actors actually affect, for example, how long the conflict lasts, how lethal the conflict is.
But the problem is that the actors do not offer it in a backroom. If you look, for example, at Colombia, you cannot just look at spark.
You need to look at other guerrilla or other paramilitaries because the characteristics affect the activities of the other armed groups in the region.
The forward was definitely looking at conflict sites, looking at rebel government power.
If you're a rebel, rebel, Fabricio. But the problem is that the conflict is not always only about Dias.
It's not just the pair of actors. It's more. It's more complicated.
Then recently you can see that there's lots of data collection efforts where, for example, you see TV reference even to your friends conflict events.
Think of for actual data where you actually get data on individual violent events.
Right. And those are often linked to actors or diets of actors.
And for example, Cuba and Gladiator,
they try to forecast conflict onset and conflict termination by looking at classic variables for prediction of civil war,
but also adding to those that it's a dyadic analysis of some information about the conflict events.
They found that it can actually help with a bit with the forecast, but not much.
It was not really a substantial improvement.
Well, I believe it's because the conflict diet is not the accurate portrait of the situation.
So let's have a look at the map. For example, here we have a conflict events in Colombia, conflicts that are in 2001.
And if you focus on the state, we get only those blue dots.
But there are some, for example here, red ones which are not included,
even though this is a dot which in HBO's FAQ, if you look at armed groups and we focus on fire,
then again the blue dots are represents for fighters involved, but the red dots usually is yellow and and government or other other groups.
So we basically lose quite a bit of information about the conflict.
And now we can look at the diet for some FARDC and government.
And again, we have even more red dots here.
So the point is we try to put all those things together in a reasonable way.
One more thing here. And suddenly, because of the construct of contrast, you can really see it's here.
We can see basically a network of of of interactions between different actors so that on the
phone there is fighting fire and the LRA and then paramilitaries are fighting for an ILA in 2001.
If you look at the longer period, you see more complicated picture we see here part ELN, some paramilitaries part of added to it.
It's a threat to that. I'm sorry. It's not that visible because of the contrast.
Yeah. Okay. Can you just explain the correctly? Well, the thing is that the rebels.
What's supposed to look like this?
Yeah. And that basically shows how the great is basically the number of conflict events between those actors.
So you can see that. Okay, that's touch screen. Okay.
Okay. Oh, how do I do it this way?
No. So.
So are you saying that at the beginning it was the government against fall that was 2001?
Yeah. But as time went by here and became more significant, its aggregate of from 1989 to 2016.
The point of this picture just better here is that you can see that the government is fighting for Ilan people.
Then we have a paramilitary starting fighting those blasting Gary off.
Then we have added to it cartels.
And the lines actually shows you how all these actors are connected and the connections are essentially the bubbles between them.
And this demonstrates that diets are just not enough.
Right. So you have the approaches to conflict.
The conflict analysis are conflict.
So lots of research is doing quantitative research that express the need for conflict zones,
going beyond state borders and create conflict zones, which would actually move with time, which would not be static.
But that's a that's that's not that easy.
Joe One of the first things was in 2012 by Buhari and Gates, and they basically create a conflict scope.
The conflict scope is this circle, the circle here.
What they did, they'd look at conflicts, find a central point, and then do a circle around it.
And they look at the area, how big the ice, and they try to correlate with, for example, how long the conflict is.
And they found larger. The scope is longer. The conflict this but this.
You can see it's not really accurate representation of what is happening here.
One of the newest attempts is by BEARDSLEY and Lo.
And they basically look at the at the conflict events and try to create a complex how here and you can see here these dots are the conflict.
So basically create a shape which would include all those conflict movements.
Yes, you can see here. I mean, this is this is one, you know, here, here, here, here and here.
So this bit here might not be part of the conflict at all.
So, again, it's not really accurate representation of this.
Not to mention that they are using conflict strong solar data, which essentially in most of the cases that present in combat is quite good.
They use the conflict groups government of Colombia far beyond EPA.
But if you look, for example, at Nigeria and Somalia, most of the conflict are conflicts.
According to Uppsala, the equal diets. As I said, the situation is much more complicated.
So what we need to do, we need to create a geographical unit which would be changing over time,
would not be dependent on state borders, and would address the connections between different related conflicts.
So how do we do that before? Before I start, I would like to say our definition of war or conflict is based on Goldstone.
And he said that war is essentially legal.
Intergroup violence. Legal means that it costs at least one fatality and think that means that we focus on actors
by when we try to define their their geographical limits and their interactions between them.
So first, we look at each of our conflict four brigades and identify the main conflicts and then look at the and try to find relate the conflict.
Basically trace the evolution of the evolution of the conflict over time.
Once you have this, you look inside of those conflicts and identify the relevant actors.
We get the little girl along at the top.
So our data and then we use the the conflict events from the start and identify the relevant events by looking at if that event,
if includes two or parallel actors basically are two role actors are clashing.
That's our events and that even should help us to draw the geographically in that so example how we actually do it here.
Boko Haram insurgency as I wrote here, quantitative tracing since 2009.
What I mean is that I'm doing the quantitative part of the project and quantitatively the conflict demonstrates in the data we saw in 2009,
not before the qualitative part of the project of the conflict, but you can actually trace the rules before 2009.
But I'm focusing on 2000 and because of the data. So the main topic is the Islamists instruments led by Boko Haram.
But later on it was joined by other groups. The really the conflicts is sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni.
And as you point out, there are some other conflicts in in in Nigeria, Niger, Delta, separatism, and then also found pastoralist conflict.
But we didn't include them because they are not related to Islamist insurgency or sectarian violence here.
The Niger Delta have the presence of the reason for for nothing,
principally because it's the different location and the actors are not almost at all connected.
The foreign fighters conflict, it's a little bit complicated, but because we are we do not rely only on quantitative data.
We are also regional experts like I'm also people who did fieldwork in those.
Then for cases we can always when we are not sure.
So for example, here we are not sure about the income from customers, but we can reach out to them and discuss whether we should include it.
But it also conflicts are actually related. And although some of the actors here in this conflict are Muslims and you could see,
oh, I see Christian-Muslim conflict dynamic here based on the discussion,
the expert panel say that actually Boko Haram either recruits or side with with the Muslims in in this conflict, it's more random.
So based on that, we identify the following actors and then selected the conflict events.
So I can actually show your mom. Oh, okay.
Yeah. Just a moment.
Right. So here we see a map of Nigeria.
The blue dots are those we can include in the in our conflict setting and the red dots, which not.
So you can see how is it actually changing? And it's a and it's moving slowly more towards the borders and it's crossing the borders here.
So I will stop it here. Just to show you what are examples of the blue dots, the blue dots here, for example, in Nigeria.
And this long name is essentially Boko Haram. Here the red dots are type of fighting or cluster the farmers herders conflict.
Right. Okay. When you get back, you can look at Columbia, which is different.
It's not a sub state conflict. It's not located in a in a in a region of the state.
It's essentially covering all state and global pressing borders do.
The main conflict here is Columbia versus left in Gary are the related conflicts or the evolution of the conflict which you could trace?
Is the paramilitaries fighting lesbian guerilla?
Then we have drug cartels and other criminal groups joining in and here is the loss of the role of access.
We go and I can show you again the map.
Yeah. It's much faster on my laptop. Hmm.
Okay. Here we go. So, again, the blue dots are the ones which we include.
And the red dots, which we don't.
In this iteration, the red dots are slightly different and I will pause it and explain it.
You see quite a lot of red dots here, and that's related to our definition of conflict or of war.
When you say intergroup violence, but many of those dots are fake, which is a relevant actor and civilians.
The problem with this here is that we don't really know whether civilians represent a specific group or not.
Can it might not be intergroup violence, but it might be within group violence just to send a new signal within groups.
Right. So we do not include it for our drawing of of the geographical unit.
But as you can see you later, it doesn't matter much because those which are civilians and and the relevant actors are mostly in the same area.
As far as the Intergroup of Violence.
Also, again, we discuss these allegations of those thoughts and of those events with the regional experts.
And they they point out if we actually missed something important or some important part or region of the conflict and then we can correct,
we can actually go and try to trace further the events of the violence against civilians in that specific region.
Actually, it was intergroup violence or not, and then we can include it.
Right now, how do we actually draw that new geographical if we basically create a conflict polygon?
So first we start with the dots. Those are the identified groups for Boko Haram insurgency.
And this is just, for example, 2014.
So one dots here. So while evens are dots, then we create a area which is triggered by the dots, and we use for that algorithm for a concave hub,
which I believe is more precise than the previous one, the convex whole, which I show by the blood and law.
So the difference between concave and convex whole is the following.
We have the events here and that can be a shameful borders or a conflict zone here.
And convex hull would be the whole thing here.
But nothing is happening over here. That's why we use concave wall instead of the convex.
How to avoid this empty space. The interesting thing is that in international relations or conflict with that you usually see convex hull.
So people will improve this.
But if you go to environmental literature or for example before studies, you see lots of variations of concave hull, which is more.
So we have conquered hard, but we are not finished with this because we now that the chair of a reference conflict minerals are not always
exactly accurate if it comes to education pride month study data for Afghanistan and you cross-reference them with,
for example, information from soldiers and you find out that 75% of your friends events in books data have a special error of below 1550 kilometres.
That means that basically 75% of the events are plus -50 kilometres correctly located.
So to mitigate for this potential problem, we include the threat that is a blue line here as a buffer zone, which is essentially 50 kilometres here.
And then we are not the cleanest there because you might say, okay, well, you have nice area,
you see the shape and now you know nothing about it quantitatively, right?
Was the population density you get population density for for state as such, maybe for administrative unit.
That's why we link our data,
our events and our our shape with real rate progress is it's a very nice project which
is basically a square or great shape with resolutions of .5.5 decimal decrease.
Great. So you can, you can imagine that you have a globe and you put a net of grids over it.
And what is very interesting is that each of those little squares which are at the equator,
50 by 30 kilometres, roughly, they contain information about population density,
about discrimination of ethnic groups, nightlights, which can be nice proxies for economic development, also information about natural resources.
Therefore, we get nice information about those crucial indicators for conflict for our, you know.
So I, I just explain how we are.
We actually built our our geographically in a four complex setting, but it certainly has some limitations.
I I'm sure that you will find many more. And I'm looking for your feedback.
So first of all, if you create new geographical units, you have access to less data.
And that's true because lots of data are force states. Right. And it's very difficult to disaggregated and put that into the shape that you just read.
But thanks to full breadth, we can actually mitigate for that and get all those databases spinning.
Then you can say, Oh, we might have a possible selection bias. We are now currently working with ten cases and the selection is based is
basically the protracted conflict that the UN has presents or strong presents,
and those are specific cases you don't see strong, clear and present presence in Caucasus, in Russian part of Caucasus.
Right. That's just not going to happen. But we are aware of that.
We are aware of those specific characteristics.
So I believe with the proper interpretation of the results and putting them into context, you can mitigate for it.
Also, once we have all the data together and we are in the process of collection of the data,
the two cases and in the process five more cases have not finished yet.
I'm sure that we will be able to apply statistical methods such as matching to deal with that possible bias.
And then as I mentioned already before, the you see typically that they suffer from severe biases.
It can be again not it might be problems with accuracy of the data if it comes to location.
Sometimes they are you can see that more remote area is less precise.
The informations are or they can be completely missed. But again we forget that the buffer zone.
So if the location is not precise, then we can actually mitigate for that.
And again, we talk to the regional experts who do the field work there.
Therefore, I'm sure if there would be some important event happening which could actually change the shape of our unit,
we would not miss that, but we have also several advantages.
So first of all, the geographical unit portrays much better in much by the way,
what is actually happening in those four cases do not separate conflicts.
If they are closely related, we put them reasonably together.
Also, we can see the dynamic over time, right?
You can see how is it developing? And that's the prior breath.
We have not only information or a lot of data about the spatial about the geographical unit, but we have also lots of variation within that unit.
You could see there was lots of breadth. So we get specific information for each of those squares.
Last thing which I would like to say is that in the future, because we are still at the beginning,
we are still collecting the data, we are still improving the methodology.
The goal is to create methodological guidelines which which could help to assist people to build their own geographical unit of all.
So think of organised violence for out of protracted conflicts, for example, those in the Caucasus and to hope those are the people.
We are working on an interactive website and now hoping to write our package which could do quite a bit of that work,
which I demonstrated fairly automatically.
Our outcome of that is the work for other people and if we see that the other people are using, then we get more results.
We can compare those results to problems of change in protracted conflicts and then we can actually generalise more from that.
The ultimate goal is quantification of those five dimensions.
And as I said, if you cannot quantify something, you cannot quantify the key indicators of conflict.
If you don't know where is the conflict happening, what are the borders of the conflict?
And if I am talking about borders, not only geographically. So for that we are working on the conflicts of thing.
And once we have that, we actually now where the conflicts are, how they are developing,
they can actually more precisely quantify how many ethnic groups are actually discriminated,
what type of methods exactly are used in those specific areas,
not on average in the whole state or some large areas around those following, but specifically in that country.
And this can help us more to trace the changes are.
In different dimensions and their impact on civilians.
And that's it for me. Thank you for.