Non-Traditional Archives / Data / Analysis for
Political Conflict & Violence
Political Conflict & Violence
Intro
Welcome to the Radical Information Project or, rather, welcome back as this represents the relaunch of the webpage. The reason for this project:
Across all of the projects, it is maintained that part of the difficulty with assessing causes for contentious political relations is influenced by the type of information that we utilize within our analyses. Specifically, we are not very good at selecting between alternative accounts of historical records (e.g., newspapers) and we are not very good at tracking dissidents/repressors or dissent/repression through space as well as time. Each project is directed toward improving this situation - albeit with different substantive interests and across different temporal-spatial domains. Enjoy and feel free to communicate any suggestions.
Enjoy
[Christian Davenport]
Director - The Radical Information Project
Professor of Political Science - University of Michigan
Faculty Associate - Center for Political Studies, Institute for Social Research
Research Professor & Global Fellow - Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO)
Director - The Costs of Contention
Co-Director - The Conflict & Peace Initiative
Co-Director - Conflict & Peace, Research & Development
Co-Founder/Director - Conflict Consortium (CC) (with Professor Will Moore)
Co-Founder - New Jack Academics (with Professor Darren Davis)
Co-Founder - .EDU: opening minds & changing worlds (with Professor Jillian Schwedler & Rodney Williams)
- Efforts to investigate and understand the world around us are invariably dependent upon the information that is made available about this reality. Such dependence has led some to collect and distribute information and others to scoff at such an effort being fundamentally biased, naive or limited in nature. Much of the criticisms from the latter group revolve around the fact that only certain individuals seem to get their story told; history is censored or is told from the position of the victors. If true, this information could undermine our efforts to understand, to predict, and to act - leading to biased causal inferences and misguided efforts at reform/social change.
- Accordingly, this webpage is dedicated to providing information from the so-called mainstream/predominant actors as well as from the "censored" or "neglected" voices. The information contained here represents the outcome of numerous data collection efforts undertaken by those who were/are interested in understanding what Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow have labeled "contentious politics" (i.e., those relations between members of society and their government that extend outside of the parameters of normal, routinized, institutionalized, political interactions).
Across all of the projects, it is maintained that part of the difficulty with assessing causes for contentious political relations is influenced by the type of information that we utilize within our analyses. Specifically, we are not very good at selecting between alternative accounts of historical records (e.g., newspapers) and we are not very good at tracking dissidents/repressors or dissent/repression through space as well as time. Each project is directed toward improving this situation - albeit with different substantive interests and across different temporal-spatial domains. Enjoy and feel free to communicate any suggestions.
Enjoy
[Christian Davenport]
Director - The Radical Information Project
Professor of Political Science - University of Michigan
Faculty Associate - Center for Political Studies, Institute for Social Research
Research Professor & Global Fellow - Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO)
Director - The Costs of Contention
Co-Director - The Conflict & Peace Initiative
Co-Director - Conflict & Peace, Research & Development
Co-Founder/Director - Conflict Consortium (CC) (with Professor Will Moore)
Co-Founder - New Jack Academics (with Professor Darren Davis)
Co-Founder - .EDU: opening minds & changing worlds (with Professor Jillian Schwedler & Rodney Williams)