Program on Security Institutions and Violent Instability (Synthesizing data on militaries, paramilitaries, police, and constitutions)
Michaela Mattes, Professor
Political Science
Closed. This professor is continuing with Fall 2024 apprentices on this project; no new apprentices needed for Spring 2025.
(This project synthesizes work done by URAP teams led by Professors Arriola, Matanock, and Mattes in previous semesters.)
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 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 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, over the last few semesters, we collected three datasets on the design of domestic security institutions across 102 developing countries from 1980-2017. The first dataset collected information on countries’ regular military forces as well as paramilitaries and militias potentially involved in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism; the second dataset collected information on countries’ police forces; and the third collected data on constitutional provisions outlining the authority and jurisdiction of individual security forces and coordinating mechanisms between them. Our goal is to combine these separate data collections.
Role: The first priority this semester will be improving our data on police forces. Police forces play an important role in preventing conflict from emerging in the first place and in helping to pacify post-conflict areas after military operations have ceased. Despite their clear importance in successful counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, police forces have rarely been studied, in part because reliable data has been missing. During the semester we will compare data we collected on police forces with data collected on country irregular forces which often also include police forces like gendarmeries in order to ensure that we have reliable yearly data on which police forces existed in a given developing country in a given year. URAPers role will be 1) to match forces in the police data to forces in the irregular military forces data and 2) to collect additional information on individual police forces such as on which agency oversees the force, their geographic focus, their level of armament, their force numbers etc. if this information is lacking in the current data.
The second task will be to compare the regular military, paramilitary, police, and other forces provided for in countries’ constitutions to the forces that we know actually existed on the ground based on our other two data collections. This is important to determine whether what exists on paper is matched by reality.
For both tasks, undergraduate research apprentices will rely on our previously collected data and documentation as well as secondary materials, online sources, encyclopedias, and other reference material. Research apprentices will write brief summaries on their insights that will form the backbone of our final synthesized data set. This work will help to significantly improve the quality of our data for our own purposes and for the larger scholarly community.
The apprenticeship is designed to expose undergraduate researchers 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. 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: Qualifications: Research apprentices should be familiar with how to use library and electronic resources, and possess tenacity in tracking down specific information about particular cases. Strong writing skills are desirable as well. Foreign language skills are a plus, since some information might be most easily available on foreign country websites.
Hours: 6-8 hrs
Social Sciences