Suchergebnisse

In the last decade advances in statistics, computing power, and data collection has led to an increased interest in forecasting within the field of peace and conflict research and to the adoption of a wide range of methodological approaches for making such forecasts. By making use of these more powerful forecasting methods researchers have been able to produce accurate predictions, as well as better inferences, of many different types of contentious politics events and to create operational early warning systems for such events. Adapting these forecasting methods to the social world in which politics and political behavior operate, however, is not without its challenges. This dissertation explores a number of methodological issues and advances in peace and conflict research, both inferential and forecasting oriented, through a series of four papers. In the first paper, I explore trends in democratization and autocratization using dynamic simulation. In Paper II, my co-author and I take aim at the difficulty of modeling and making forecasts with data which contains both excess zeroes and extreme-values. We propose an extreme-value and zero-inflated regression model which we use to replicate a study on the effects of UN peacekeepers on violence against civilians. Paper III explores latent variable modeling by using Markov models to make forecasts for escalation and de-escalation of armed conflicts. In the last paper, I investigate the effects of missing data and imputation techniques on the predictive performance of models. The four papers of the dissertation make several contributions to the growing literature of forecasting within peace and conflict research. First, the dissertation contributes to the methodological aspects of conflict forecasting by developing new statistical tools, Paper II, and adapting tools from other fields to different processes of armed conflict and contentious politics, Papers I & III, as well as by evaluating the practical effects of common choices in data pre-processing on the performance of forecasts in Paper IV. Second, the dissertation contributes to new ways of drawing inferences about conflict processes by anchoring the inferences in the latent state of the conflict processes in Papers II & III, and through the comparison of aggregated simulations to the historical record in Paper I. Lastly, the dissertation makes a substantive contribution to the broader field of peace and conflict research in Papers I & II by contributing to the debate on the waves of democratization and autocratization, and by nuancing the impact of UN Peacekeepers on violence against civilians.

A transition to sustainable development and net-zero greenhouse gas emissions is key to achieve the temperature limits established by the Paris Agreement (PA) and the global sustainable development goals (SDGs) agreed in the 2030 Agenda. To explore how carbon market approaches under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement can contribute to the transformational change required by these global agreements, the German Environment Agency (UBA) has commissioned UNEP DTU Partnership in collaboration with Perspectives Climate Research and First Climate to carry out this research project. The project aims to generate insights and recommendations for how to design and implement Article 6 rules and activities to promote transformational change (TC) through carbon markets. Based on insights from a literature review and expert interviews, the authors propose a definition of transformational change with four characteristics particularly relevant to Article 6 objectives, namely 'Digitalisation', 'Private sector and Governments', 'Carbon pricing' and 'Dynamic baselines'. In the context of Article 6 negotiations up to COP26 in Glasgow and an overview of Article 6 piloting efforts, conceptual options are presented for Article 6 activities to promote transformational change. An incentive structure for carbon markets to promote Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) ambition raising, and transformational impact is introduced. Insights from a comparative case study analysis of different NDCs and sectors in Costa Rica, Morocco and Pakistan demonstrate how transformational impact can be designed and assessed at Article 6 activity level. Findings are used to identify implications for Article 6 design so that activities enhance their transformational impact. For instance, higher prices for internationally transferred mitigation outcomes (ITMOs) with transformational impact can enable the political will in host countries to undertake deep mitigation opportunities while achieving cost-efficient emission reductions with domestic means. Key conclusions and recommendations are that core carbon market principles such as of additionality and baselines-setting can be reinterpreted in order to promote transformational change aligned with the global 1.5°C temperature goal.

The Making of Colonial Brazil, 1500-1694 -- A New Colonial Order, 1695-1821 -- Independent Brazil and the Consolidation of a Nation, 1822-1850 -- Late Imperial Brazil, 1851-1889 -- Republican Brazil, 1889-1929 -- Getúlio Vargas in Power, 1930-45 -- Experiments in Democracy, 1946-64 -- Rule of the Military, 1964-1985 -- The Return to Democracy, 1985-1994 -- Consolidating Democracy, 1994-2006 -- A Nation Polarized, 2006-present