The Social Conflict in Africa Database (SCAD) is a resource for conducting research and analysis on various forms of social and political unrest in Africa. It includes over 6,000 social conflict events across Africa from 1990 to 2009, including riots, strikes, protests, coups, and communal violence. SCAD does not include civil and interstate conflicts. By tracking forms of conflict not covered in traditional datasets on civil and interstate war, SCAD gives policymakers and researchers new tools to analyze conflict patterns.

If I do say so myself, these data are very, very cool: event data covering the entire continent from 1990-2009, with annual updates and all sorts of goodies to come.

Special thanks for excellent research support, website construction, and georeferencing is due to Ashley Moran, Laura Jones, Kaiba White, and Sarah Williams at UT Austin. This was a monumental (and often thankless) undertaking, and we really appreciate all the work that went in to it.

Tell your friends, tell your enemies.

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When someone sitting next to me on an airplane asks me what I do, I usually say I study the politics of food.  Food is gloriously universal: we all need it, and, globally, 1 in 3 of us still spends our waking hours planting and/or harvesting it.  Worldwide, most farmers are poor and live in low-income countries, and are thus vulnerable both because of low levels of material wealth and because of the higher levels of social and political violence that characterize poorer countries.  Thankfully, food is also a great tool for peace: from Israel and Palestine to Iraq and South Africa, “peace meals”, which bring together former partisans to conflicts and people from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds, have become part of the healing process.  The same, simple good cheer and food we share tonight can be part of bringing peace, stability, and hope to troubled places.

But, as we sit down to dinner tonight, there will be roughly 925 million people around the world—three times the population of the United States—that will be going hungry.  The number of people experiencing food insecurity—a lack of access to the basic nutrition necessary to lead a healthy, active life—increased in the last five years, reversing three decades of progress in eradicating world hunger.

The causes of world hunger are at once maddeningly simple and incredibly complex.  Fundamentally, hunger is a problem of poverty: people go hungry in the world not because we don’t make enough food to feed everyone, but rather because they are not able—because they’re too poor to afford it, or it’s not available locally—to access it.  However, the causes of food insecurity are themselves complex, involving government policy, both here and abroad, but also technological factors, like access to fertilizers and tractors, and environmental factors like temperature, rainfall, and natural disasters like cyclones, flooding, and droughts.

Here, in the developed world, we’ve done a remarkable job of insulating our lives from our physical environment.  Most, if not all of us live in climate-controlled homes, arrived here this evening in climate-controlled cars, and generally lead climate-controlled lives.  This is largely true of our food production systems, as well, which are highly regulated and fed by high-tech fertilizers and irrigation systems.  Not so in much of the developing world: less than 5 percent of cultivated land in Africa benefits from irrigation, meaning that when the rain doesn’t come (or too much comes at once), crops fail with alarming regularity, harming rural livelihoods and causing hunger.

This brings me to two important points.  First, global climate change will likely exacerbate these problems.  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasts dramatic increases in extreme weather events over broad swaths of Africa and Asia, the continents that are home to the world’s most food insecure populations.  Second, and here’s the kicker: it’s our fault—partially, at least.  The question is “what are we going to do about it?”

There is broad consensus that a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions will be necessary to prevent the most catastrophic effects of global climate change.  The sticking point, which global leaders discussed this past week in Cancun, is who will do the cutting.  About 80 percent of carbon emissions since the Industrial Revolution have been by only 20% of the world’s population in industrialized countries: the United States, the European Union, Japan, and the former Soviet Union.  Carbon emissions made our societies wealthy and gave us the wherewithal to address future problems, but these past emissions threaten the ability of other countries to use fossil fuels in order to do the same.  Moreover, most of the damage was done long before the scientific community realized that our fossil fuel-dependent mode of development would have real effects on the global climate.

However, roughly 80 percent of the growth in carbon emissions since 2000 has been in the developing world, particularly China.  The governments of many of these countries see environmental concerns as secondary to their prime directive: to raise their populations out of poverty.  Any meaningful movement on climate change will require compromise between countries that contributed the most to creating the problem—and benefited greatly in doing so—and those countries that view caps on future emissions as a potential break on their ability to develop and meet the basic needs, including food security, of their people.

No meaningful agreement on CO2 emissions can be made without the United States and China.  The United States didn’t know what it was doing in 1945 when we were completely dependent on coal-fired power plants, but we don’t have widespread hunger.  China knows what it is doing—the Chinese government doesn’t impugn the science of climate change—but it views hunger and poverty as more pressing concerns.  Here’s the dilemma: how do you “grow” the developing world out of poverty and food insecurity without massively increasing CO2 emissions, and how do you persuade them to develop “cleanly” unless the “developed” world first steps up to the plate and does its part?

Check it out here.

1. What are the prerequisites?

PSCI 1040 and PSCI 1050 are the nominal prerequisites for the IPE course. Of course, both are requirements for earning a degree in the state of Texas, so these shouldn’t be a considerable stumbling block to your taking the course.

That said, people who have taken courses in international economics (i.e., trade, finance) or international relations more broadly defined (such as PSCI 3810) will have a leg up at the outset. Not to worry, however: the course is designed so that no previous experience with economics is required.

2. Is there a lot of math?

Lots of folks think math and economics are synonymous. While economics can certainly get technical, this course will be largely free of math. You may have to do some simple multiplication and division.

3. What if I don’t (think I) understand economics?

Don’t worry: I was in your shoes as an undergrad. I didn’t think I was math- or econ-savvy at all. You can do this. And once you do, you’ll find the world a much more interesting/maddening/enlightening/frustrating place because of it.

The bank in April approved the controversial loan — its first for South Africa since the end of apartheid — to fund development of a coal-fired power plant, despite the lack of support from the United States, Netherlands and Britain.

After residents from the northern Limpopo region, where the 4,800 MW Medupi plant will be built, protested that the project posed health and environmental hazards, the bank’s inspection panel recommended that a proper investigation into the allegations be conducted.

–W.Bank probes $3.75 bln loan to S.Africa’s Eskom, Reuters.com

This story seems to perfectly encapsulate two of the most thorny issues with aid, development, and climate change:

1. the tradeoff between immediate improvement in standards of living in the developing world through energy infrastructure and the detrimental effects of coal-fired power plants, which are a a major source of atmospheric CO2 and local pollution,

2. the lack of transparency and easily available information on multilateral aid projects. Stories like these only serve to highlight why sources like AidData.org, which make data on multilateral aid projects easy to find and digest, are so crucial.

In a working paper with Steph Haggard at UCSD and Beatriz Magaloni at Stanford, we set out to see whether world food prices could be linked emprirically to patterns of protest in Africa and Asia: the two regions of the world with the most food-insecure inhabitants.

With respect to food prices, our paper has makes two points. First, price changes from year to year matter, but not in the straightforward, Neo-Malthusian way in which the media clamor over the subject would suggest. Large annual price increases and decreases (measured in percentage changes in overall prices from the previous year) are associated with more protests and riots. Put differently, protests are more likely when prices are rising are falling rapidly. The effect is stronger for price decreases, however: a relatively modest decrease in food prices predicts about the same incidence of protest as a comparatively large (i.e., 50% or greater) increase.

This finding seems puzzling until one considers the fact that while food prices eat up a significant portion of the incomes of the urban poor, they constitute the entirety of the incomes of food producers–still a relatively large proportion of the population in Africa and Asia. Falling prices hit them squarely in the wallet, just as rising prices hit consumers.

Second, the effect of food price changes is only evident in hybrid regimes: those political systems that aren’t quite full, consolidated democracies but aren’t fully repressive autocracies either. This category includes two very different regime types: failed states with little or no centralized political authority, such as Somalia, formerly one-party systems in which there are now multiparty elections, but the largest party still holds undue sway over democratic processes and the government’s repressive apparatus, such as Tanzania or Zimbabwe. Strong democracies and strong autocracies seem immune to the protest-forming effects of food prices.

Why, especially considering that the study already accounts for the differences in wealth between different regimes? My guess, and this is pure, unadulterated, untested conjecture at this point, is that democracies do a better job of addressing consumer and producer concerns by intervening in markets in order to shield voters from what economists call “price shocks”. Mexican president Felipe Calderon did just that in 2008, brokering a deal with Mexican food producers to cap prices on over 150 staples until the end of that year. In strong autocracies, however, the penalties for publicly demonstrated against the regime may be too high for even hungry citizens to bear.

The paper will be posted soon, but here are the quick hits–some of which won’t be surprising, some of which might be:

1. Principal factor analysis (and oldie but a goodie) demonstrates the underlying dimensionality of state capacity is low, with three latent factors explaining over 90 percent of the variance in the 15 measures.

2. The dimensions do not map neatly on to the theoretical groupings: while the first factor, rational legality, captures bureaucratic and administrative capacity, the second, rentier-autocraticness, and third, neopatrimoniality, capture aspects of state capacity that cut across the theoretical categories. Rentier-autocraticness captures reliance on primary commodity exports, high state capture of economic resources (as proxied by taxation and total revenue), and low levels of democracy: this is your classic oil-rich, authoritarian state. Neopatrimoniality combines low extractive capacity with reliance on primary commodities and higher military expenditures–oil rich principalities and resource-rich tinpot dictators.

3. The first two dimensions do a better job of “sorting” the world into groups of states that have experienced civil conflict during the period of study (1984-1999) and those that haven’t. Here is a table from the paper in which I list the top five and bottom five countries, using their average scores for the panel. The countries in italics experienced a civil war/conflict in those years, the others did not:

4. The first dimension gives us a grouping we are pretty familiar with: the typical low-development, low-bureaucratic quality countries we all recognize as weak states. The second dimension gives us a slightly less intuitive (though consistent with Paul Collier’s recent book), nevertheless important grouping: low-revenue democracies.