Data and Conflict

This course equips students for humanitarian, human rights, foreign policy, and political risk jobs that require real-time interpretation and analysis of conflict data. The course will introduce students to contemporary open-source data about conflict events, fatalities, forced displacement, human rights violations, settlement patterns in war zones, and much more. Students will learn about how these data are generated, what they reveal, what they obscure, and the choices analysts can make to use conflict data transparently in the face of biases. Then, students will learn introductory skills to visualize conflict data in R and ArcGIS Pro. The objective is to give students the foundations to go further independently after the course using open-source training material and trouble-shooting portals. Each student will choose a conflict-related policy problem they will investigate.