Studying Why We Fight with R
Preface
Quantitative tools for studying conflict are easier to access than ever before. With so many tools to choose from, it’s impossible to write a manual about all of them. We have to make choices. Here, I propose we lay our bets on the growing ecosystem of open-source databases accessible through the R programming language.
To organize our exploration of these tools, we’ll follow along with the book Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace (Blattman 2023). In this book, Blattman outlines five reasons for war and four paths to peace. We’ll see if we can wrangle together datasets that will help us test Blattman’s arguments with systematic empirical evidence.
Ultimately, the goal isn’t to support or refute Blattman’s claims. Rather, it is to motivate practical examples for how we can access, manipulate, and analyze conflict data in R. If the findings we make in the course of our analysis also happen to be interesting, that’s a nice added bonus.
Ready? Let’s go…