Conferences - Friday, May 22, 2009
Doctoral Students Attend Training and Work on IPI Security Council Compliance Database
The compilation of the IPI Security Council Compliance Database entered into a new phase on May 22, 2009 as twenty-five doctoral students began systematically assessing compliance by civil-war parties with more than 1,500 specific demands issued by the UN Security Council to them in the context of twenty-five recent civil wars. Today the majority of the coders came to New York to attend a full-day training workshop at IPI’s Trygve Lie Center for Peace, Conflict and Development. The remaining coders will go through a similar training in the coming weeks.
The twenty-five students currently pursue doctoral studies focused on conflict studies and/or conflict management. During their graduate studies, each of them has extensively researched the specific civil war they will examine further for IPI. Over the coming months, they will work as consultants for IPI, assessing compliance with all demands to civil war parties that were issued in UN Security Council resolutions during the first fifteen years after the Cold War (1989-2003).
The doctoral students will evaluate the level of compliance with each demand both in the short and medium terms as well as the ‘depth’ of action required by each demand. Each score will be accompanied by quotations from primary and secondary sources that form the basis of the assessment. The assessments and the background material will be published online in the IPI Security Council Compliance Database. To mitigate the risks associated with the subjectivity of each expert coder’s assessment, each coding decision was assigned to two doctoral students working independently.
The full-day training workshop familiarized the expert coders with the rigorous methodology developed for the evaluation of compliance with UN Security Council resolutions by Christoph Mikulaschek, Senior Policy Analyst at IPI. A methodological manual will be published together with the IPI Security Council Compliance Database in 2011.
The following doctoral students will work as expert coders for IPI’s project on Understanding Compliance with UN Security Council Resolutions in Civil Wars:
Fernando Chinchilla, Université de Montréal
Will Clegg, St. Paul’s College
Teresa Cravo, Harvard University & University of Cambridge
Dan Fahey, University of California, Berkley
Renee Gendron, University of Amsterdam
Patricia Gossman, Afghanistan Justice Project
Brent Hierman, Indiana University
Chelsea Johnson, University of California, Berkley
Chen Kertcher, Tel-Aviv University
Natacha Lemasle, Northwestern University & Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris
Megan MacKenzie, Harvard University
Sarah-Myriam Martin-Brûlé, McGill University
Cynthia Michota, Georgia State University
Madalena Moita, Complutense University
Mateja Peter, University of Cambridge
Philippe Rieder, Concordia University
Cyrus Samii, Columbia University
Lindsey Scorgie, University of Cambridge
Lee Seymour, Harvard University
David Siroky, Duke University
Kimairis L. Toogood, George Mason University
Daniel Millan Valencia, University of Essex
Charlotte Walker, Yale University
Jeni Whalan, University of Oxford
Carla Winston, US Institute of Peace
The Global Observatory
Interview with John Prendergast, Co-Founder, Enough Project
Mr. Prendergast discusses the international justice system and the new ground forged by Invisible Children's Kony2012 campaign.
Key Global Events to Watch in May
A list of key upcoming meetings and events with implications for global affairs.
The Global Observatory is a new website by IPI, providing timely analysis on peace and security issues, interviews with leading policymakers, interactive maps, and more.
Recent Events
May 10, 2012
Arbour: What the Rule of Law Means
“In my understanding of the rule of law, fundamentally, what the rule of law means is that it embraces the principle of equality before the law,” Louise Arbour, president of the International Crisis Group (ICG), told an IPI audience on May 10, 2012. Ms. Arbour outlined that this means that no one is above the law and everyone has both equal protection and equal benefit of the law. 
May 03, 2012
Shachtman: Cyber Threats Akin to South Bronx, Not Pearl Harbor
“There’s not a danger of a cyber Pearl Harbor… it’s more like the South Bronx circa 1999, where there’s a danger that it becomes such a tough neighborhood that no one wants to set up shop there and people move out,” Noah Shachtman, editor of the Danger Room blog at Wired magazine and non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution, told an IPI audience at a panel on cyber security on May 3, 2011.
April 27, 2012
Preventing Conflicts in Africa: The Role of Early Warning and Response Systems
An April 27th roundtable discussion at IPI titled “Preventing Conflicts in Africa: The Role of Early Warning and Response Systems” examined the progress, prospects and challenges of regional and international early warning and response mechanisms to monitor, anticipate, and mitigate potential conflict situations in Africa.