Program on Security Institutions and Violent Instability (Constitutional Legal Frameworks)
Aila Matanock, Professor
Political Science
Closed. This professor is continuing with Fall 2024 apprentices on this project; no new apprentices needed for Spring 2025.
(This is one of three pieces of a collaborative project between Professors Arriola, Matanock, and Mattes.) Countries around the world are increasingly confronting violent irregular threats such as insurgencies and terrorism. Yet, many countries have proven unable to effectively deploy their security institutions (including regular militaries, paramilitaries, and police) when responding to such threats even if they have sufficient resources at their disposal. For example, while resource-poor Ethiopia has managed to mobilize its forces to successfully prevent most attacks within its borders by Al-Shabaab, the Somali jihadist terrorist group affiliated with Al-Qaeda, oil-rich Nigeria has repeatedly failed to coordinate its forces in preventing further attacks from a comparable threat, Boko Haram, the Islamist group linked to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Our project, which is supported by the U.S. Department of Defense, is designed to explain why some states’ security institutions are more effective than others. To shed light on this question we have collected a dataset on the design of domestic security institutions across 102 developing countries.
This part of the project examines country constitutions to assess the rules in place for the design of domestic security institutions.
You will be entering the final stage of this project, so you will focus on checking the data and require detailed reading of constitutions and other resources; following rules established by the project team; and generally being extremely detail-oriented but also a careful reader with initiative.
Role: An undergraduate research apprentices will contribute to the project in the following ways:
1) Using primary documents, specifically constitutions and their amendments, you will gather detailed information on the legal frameworks establishing and governing the security institutions. You will mainly be checking the initial coding of assigned countries around the world. (The vast majority of these constitutions are in English, but a few are only available in French or Spanish, so please note language skills in your application – see below.)
2) Comparing this to other secondary documents about these security institutions.
The apprenticeship is designed to expose undergraduate students to how rigorous social science research is done. Undergraduate research assistants will learn about how to collect and process data that can then be used for statistical analysis and how to conduct detailed comparative case studies. Substantively, undergraduate research assistants will learn more about the variation that exists in countries’ domestic security institutions and how this might explain why some countries are better at fighting violent threats than others.
Qualifications: These tasks will entail careful research, good communication, and good writing skills for short summaries. Spanish or French skills are useful but not at all necessary (please note if you speak either language in your application).
Day-to-day supervisor for this project: Oren Samet-Marram, Ph.D. candidate
Hours: 9-11 hrs
Off-Campus Research Site: Virtual
Social Sciences