Corinne Bara, Senior Researcher at ETH Zurich, presents a new methodology for linking war-related violence to particular civil wars. This event is part of the International Security Research Colloquium hosted by the Centre for International Security.
Civil wars are more than battles between governments and rebels; they involve a range of actors who perpetrate different forms of violence linked to the war in some way or another. However, scholars often study these types of violence in isolation rather than in their interrelationship - a compartmentalization that further widens the gap between research and policy or practice. Despite the wide availability of disaggregated violence data, it remains difficult to link various forms of violence to each other and attribute them to a particular conflict. In this presentation, Dr. Bara will discuss this violence attribution problem and present a methodology to link various forms of war-related violence to particular civil wars using a spatial approach. Dr. Bara's dataset on War- and War-related Violence applies this approach to all data collected by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), but the approach can be adapted to link violence from any georeferenced dataset to civil wars. The overall aim is to provide a more comprehensive measure of the violence taking place in a particular war and facilitate a better understanding of the dynamics of violence within civil wars.
Speaker
Dr. Corinne Bara is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zürich, specializing in the dynamics of violence in civil wars. She earned her PhD from ETH Zürich in 2016, and subsequently held positions as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Professor at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research in Uppsala, Sweden, for six years. Dr. Bara's research examines the effects of ceasefires and peacekeeping operations on violence in civil wars, paying particular attention to shifts in the types, actors, or locations of violence as a result of these conflict management efforts. She has a passion for data science and is currently developing a project that explores the potential of digital technologies in aiding humanitarian actors, specifically in situations where access is limited or denied, such as during sieges.
