Sophie Jiseon Lee

"Guns or Roses: The Determinants of Violent and Nonviolent strategy in Political Resistance."

Political scientists have long sought to explain causes of violence. While the vast majority of previous studies contain researchers' assumptions that nonviolence is equivalent to the absence of violence, more recently, investigators conducting conflict studies have recognized nonviolence as an active strategy intended to achieve political goals. This trend of studying violent resistance (such as civil wars) and nonviolent ones (such as pro-democracy movements) together as comparable units creates a framework that integrates the theories related to both. By analyzing 250 political movements of various types, drawn from the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO) data, I examine factors that may influence the choice of violence or nonviolence as a strategy. I first theorize that dissident organizations with more resources tend to resort to violence while those with more supporters tend to resort to nonviolence. I further hypothesize that either strategy could be more costly, depending on the strategic environment in which the resistance movement takes place. My results confirm the theory, showing that nonviolent movements tend to emerge when the opposition: i) has a low level of resources; ii) has a high number of supporters; iii) receives a high level of media coverage; and iv) anticipates a low level of government repression.

Why do some resistance movements end promptly while other last longer? Despite the recent scholarly attempts to examine violent and nonviolent resistance together as comparable units, an overarching theory that explains the duration and outcomes of both types of resistance movements has not been offered. To address this gap, I examine the effect of the opposition's relative capability on the duration of resistance movements and the resulting outcome. In particular, I build a theoretical framework that accounts for the government's perspective in conceptualizing the opposition's relative capability and the resistance duration. Resistance movements end with the opposition's victory when the government perceives the threat to be greater than the cost for policy change. Oppositions end with defeat when they are unable to sustain the movements and therefore unable to make a credible threat to the government. I test this theory on 250 post-World War oppositional movements around the world and find that this theory is generally supported. This research sheds light on how the opposition's relative capability affects the duration and outcome of political movements that encompass both violent and nonviolent kinds. The study contributes to a larger literature on resistance dynamics, contentious politics, and conflict scholarship.

Extracting the “correct” location information from text data, i.e., determining the place of event, has long been a goal for automated text processing. To approximate human-like coding schema, we introduce a supervised machine learning algorithm that classifies each location word to be either correct or incorrect. We use news articles collected from around the world (Integrated Crisis Early Warning System [ICEWS] data and Open Event Data Alliance [OEDA] data) to test our algorithm that consists of two stages. In the feature selection stage, we extract contextual information from texts, namely, the N-gram patterns for location words, the frequency of mention, and the context of the sentences containing location words. In the classification stage, we use three classifiers to estimate the model parameters in the training set and then to predict whether a location word in the test set news articles is the place of the event. The validation results show that our algorithm improves the accuracy rate of the current geolocation methods of dictionary approach by as much as 25%.