The Cline Center is pleased to announce that Political Science doctoral students Jason Renn and Julian Scheirer will be joining us as 2016 Schroeder Fellows.
Jason will be working on two projects. First, in collaboration with Prof. Xinyuan Dai — one of our 2015-2016 Linowes Faculty Fellows — he will use the Cline Center’s Legal Infrastructures dataset and data from our partners at the Comparative Constitutions Project to examine how countries' legal institutions affect their willingness to ratify human rights treaties. A second line of research — part of his dissertation — will use the Cline Center’s Global News Archive to track the activities of rebel organizations and their political affiliates during post-war elections.
Julian will be working to differentiate occurrences of civil unrest that escalate to warfare from those that do not by utilizing the Cline Center’s Social, Political, and Economic Event Database (SPEED) and Composition of Religious and Ethnic Groups (CREG) data. Ultimately, his project aims to distinguish micro-level conflict processes that resolve themselves peacefully from those that risk large-scale organized violence.