REU Site: Data Science and the Political Economy of International Security

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project is funded from the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Sites program in the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). It has both scientific and societal benefits, and it integrates research and education. Across the globe, the United States faces a growing set of rapidly evolving, dauntingly complex political challenges. Economic issues sit at the root of both great power conflicts. These challenges are unfolding in a historically novel context. Against this backdrop, participants in this REU will conduct research on the connections between economics and international security, including both the economic incentives for military coercion and war and the coercive uses of economic statecraft. Equipping future scholars to both understand the economic dynamics that drive conflict and propose solutions is critical for pursuing US national interest in an era of economic interdependence. The Security and Political Economy (SPEC) Lab and the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California (USC) will provide ten undergraduates per year with an 8-week summer research experience (SRE), where they will engage in graduate-level research on the political economy of security and attend weekly workshops in research design, data science, and professional development. The program will develop a new generation of leaders who are diverse in their backgrounds and at the cutting edge in their social science skillsets. The interrelated research projects we will undertake as part of the REU sit at the cutting edge of an emerging academic subfield, the political economy of security. Our two major data projects, the Global Military Activity Dataset and the Complex Economic Interdependence Data provide essential new measures of coercive bargaining over economic issues, allowing us to measure, in a fine-grained, disaggregated way, both the economic and military interactions between states. A comprehensive dataset of military exercises, patrols, and crisis mobilizations, allows us to identify the types of military activity that signal costly preparation for conflict, and to understand the process of coercive bargaining that often occurs without shots actually being fired. Similarly, by precisely measuring the nature of economic interdependence, we can then evaluate the conditions under which interdependence provides both power and vulnerability in coercive bargaining between states. Economic interdependence raises the costs of large-scale wars but may, paradoxically, make small-scale military conflicts more common. Some of these smaller-scale military conflicts are driven by issues related to the distribution of natural resources. As they work on these projects, SRE students are thus at the cutting edge of policy-relevant social science, using advanced data science techniques to grapple with some of the most pressing questions facing humanity. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.