An Empirical Assessment of the Role of Emotions and Behavior in Conflict Using Automatically Generated Data

All Azimuth: A Journal of Foreign Policy and Peace

All Azimuth, journal of the İhsan Doğramacı Peace Foundation’s Center for Foreign Policy and Peace Research at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. It provides a forum for academic studies on foreign policy analysis and peace research as well as theoretically-oriented policy pieces on international issues.

It particularly welcomes research on the nexus of peace, security and development. It aims to publish pieces bridging the theory-practice gap; dealing with under-represented conceptual approaches in the field; and making scholarly engagements for the dialogue between the 'centre' and the 'periphery'. We strongly encourage, therefore, publications with homegrown theoretical and philosophical approaches. In this sense, All Azimuth aims to transcend the conventional theoretical, methodological, geographical, academic and cultural boundaries. All Azimuth is published two times a year by the Center for Foreign Policy and Peace Research.Automated event data extraction techniques have revolutionized the study of conflict dynamics through the ability of these techniques to generate large volumes of timely data measuring dynamic interactions among actors around the world.

In this paper, we describe our approach for adapting these techniques to extract data on sentiments and emotions, which are theorized to crucially contribute to escalating and de-escalating conflict. Political scientists view political conflict as resulting from a series of strategic interactions between groups and individuals. Psychologists highlight additional factors in political conflict, such as endorsements and condemnations, the public’s attitudetoward its leaders, the impact of public attitudes on policy, and decisions to engage in armed conflict.

This project combines these two approaches to examine hypotheses regarding the effects that different emotional impulses have on government and dissident decisions to escalate or de-escalate their use of hostility and violence. Across the two cases examined—the democratic Philippines and authoritative Egypt between 2001 and 2012-we found consistent evidence that intense societal fear of dissidents and societal disgust toward the government were associated with increases in dissident hostility. Conversely, societal anger toward dissidents was associated with a reduction in dissident hostility. However, we also found noticeable differences between the two regimes.

We close the article with a summary of these similarities and differences, along with an assessment of their mplications for future conflict studies.

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