Introduction to the Proceedings of the 19th Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science Conference

The 19th Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science conference took place at the Institute of Social Studies in the Hague 24–26 June, 2019. Nearing the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the annual conference, it continues to be a vibrant international and interdisciplinary meeting with presentations engaging in broader theoretical and empirical debates as well as introductions to much needed new data collections in the conflict and peace science community. This special issue is a collection of some of the papers presented at the conference in the format of letters. Overall, the proceedings include 12 letters, which are short versions of the on-going research projects in the field of peace science broadly defined.1 This year, the topics reflect the diverse range of innovative approaches in studying peace and conflict. The first letter in the proceedings is the annual NEPS lecture by Jean-Paul Azam. This paper is deservedly the opening letter for the special issue as the NEPS lecture is the keynote of the conference, established to acknowledge the significant contribution the individual has made in the area of peace science.2 Jean-Paul’s lecture shows how instrumental variables can be used to evaluate policy effectiveness using historical data through an example from the Naxalite conflict in India. The article starts by highlighting how misleading regression results can be without proper instrumentation and worse yet, how such misleading findings can be used as basis for decisions by policy-makers for decades before such errors are identified. In order for econometricians to avoid making such mistakes in evaluating policy effectiveness, they need to uncover the policy maker’s true preferences (which are often at odds with the official ones) by controlling for the policy maker’s endogenous responses. The next letter in the proceedings follows naturally from Azam’s lecture as it introduces the work and contributions of the winner of the 2019 Lewis Fry Richardson Award: Jean-Paul Azam. Here Thelen, Gates, and Bhatia highlight how Azam’s work on explaining violent conflict and its prevention is highly deserving of the Lewis Fry Richardson Award due to being in the ‘spirit and nature of Lewis’ work on violence and armed conflict’. The authors describe Azam’s contribution in peace science through his research in areas such as terrorism and foreign aid, civilian targeting and civil wars with the use of formal theoretical models and econometric analysis. The remainder of the special issue includes articles in three broad categories: new data collection projects in the area of peace and conflict, empirical case studies of Mexico and Liberia, as well as letters researching foreign policy and behaviour of states in the international arena. In terms of the data collection articles, in the first article Huber and Basedau introduce their newly created Religious Minorities at Risk dataset, which covers overall 771 religious minorities worldwide from 2000 to 2014. The dataset also includes information about objective deprivation and subjective grievances of these groups. While there are increasingly more data available on ethnic divisions and grievances, there are much less systematic data on religion. Huber and Basedau’s data collection efforts will thus be very useful for students of religion and conflict. Mousseau, Napolitano and Olsen on the other hand focus on human rights violations during the Kurdish conflict in Turkey. Their newly collected dataset codes information about different types of human rights violations against different targets perpetrated by the belligerents during the years 1990-2018. Thanks to this data, we can explore whether and to what extent the different parties in the Kurdish conflict abide by international norms. Furthermore, the authors base their data collection on a framework that could be applied to other contexts as well. Finally, Otto dives into an understudied aspect of peacekeeping missions – their deployment of civilian personnel. She demonstrates through the use of exploratory descriptive statistics that the deployment of civilian personnel in UN peacekeeping missions may have an effect on human rights violations during civil wars. However, as her research project demonstrates, more data are required to interrogate the under-researched area of the civilian side of peacekeeping. In her conclusion, she also specifies several research avenues for the future, which may be helpful for other researchers in this field.