The call for papers is open for the 15th Annual HiCN Workshop “New Methods in Empirical Conflict Research” that will take place at the Paris School of Economics (PSE) on 17-18 October 2019.
In the last 15 years, civil conflict has gradually become an important subject of study for empirical economists. As a result, conflict research has adopted many empirical methods from mainstream economics. Furthermore, there is now a broad consensus that violent political conflict and economic development are intertwined, and a fast-growing literature studies this relationship with micro-data. At the same time, applied research on conflict is increasingly embracing new empirical methods, such as RCTs, geospatial analysis using high-resolution satellite imagery, machine learning methods, big data applications, and the large-scale digitization of archival resources. Each of these research tools has strengths and limitations and is the subject of ongoing methodological debates.
The 15th annual Households in Conflict Network Workshop will focus on how these new methods can be used in applied research on civil conflict. As in previous editions, we welcome any empirical paper on the causes, forms and consequences of civil conflict or related forms of political violence. However, we encourage work on civil conflict that uses these new empirical methods in particular.
The workshop will have three distinguished key-note speakers:
Solomon Hsiang is the Chancellor’s Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley and a Research Associate at the NBER. He combines data with mathematical models to understand how society and the environment influence one another. In particular, he focuses on how policy can encourage economic development while managing the global climate.His work has been published in influential journals, including Scienceand Nature.
Jacob Shapiro is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and directs the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project. He studies conflict, economic and political development, and security policy. He is author of The Terrorist’s Dilemma: Managing Violent Covert Organizationsand co-author of Small Wars, Big Data: The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict. He has conducted field research and large-scale policy evaluations in Afghanistan, Colombia, India, and Pakistan. He received the Karl Deutsch Award from the International Studies Association in 2016.
Ekaterina Zhuravskaya is a Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics and EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences). Her primary field of interest is political economics with applications to ethnic violence, culture, media, corruption, and economic history. Her work has been published in influential journals. She won the European Economic Association’s Birgit Grodal Award in 2018.
The workshop will take place at the Paris School of Economics (PSE), 48 Boulevard Jourdan, Paris. The workshop is funded by the Centre pour la Recherche Economique et ses Applications (CEPREMAP).
Please send your papers to the email address of the workshop: hicn2019@gmail.com no later than 1 May 2019. Selected authors will be informed by 15 May 2019. Participants are expected to cover their transport and accommodation. A small number of scholarships will be available for PhD students who do not have access to alternative sources of funding.
The workshop is co-organized by François Libois (INRA, PSE), Oliver Vanden Eynde (CNRS, PSE), as well as the HiCN co-directors Tilman Brück (ISDC, IGZ and LSE), Patricia Justino (IDS) and Philip Verwimp (ULB).
The Households in Conflict Network (HiCN) is a global research network connecting empirical researchers working across the social sciences. HiCN publishes a working paper series with academic research and conducts annual workshops as well as topical workshops. Membership of HiCN is open to all researchers committed to the research agenda of HiCN with at least one suitable working paper for publication.
The call can be downloaded here.