Publication

This paper presents a conceptual framework for analyzing the heterogeneous and dynamic character of local conflict. The work is anchored in the need to describe conflict dynamics as they occur, to understand in real-time the political, economic, and social drivers and to gather high-resolution (e.g. local, disaggregated) data to analyze social instability. The paper demonstrates the effectiveness of such a framework and applies it to three case studies. The results suggest that the analysis of high resolution event data immediately prior to two of the conflicts could have enabled early detection and warning of the potential for large-scale civil violence.