REU Site: Data Science and the Political Economy of International Security

该项目由社会、行为和经济科学局(SBE)的本科生研究经验(REU)站点计划资助。它兼具科学和社会效益，它将研究和教育融为一体。在全球范围内，美国面临着越来越多的快速发展、令人生畏的复杂政治挑战。经济问题是两个大国冲突的根源。这些挑战是在一个具有历史新意的背景下展开的。在此背景下，REU的参与者将对经济和国际安全之间的联系进行研究，包括军事胁迫和战争的经济激励以及经济治国方略的强制使用。让未来的学者了解推动冲突的经济动态，并提出解决方案，对于在一个经济相互依存的时代追求美国的国家利益至关重要。安全与政治经济学(SPEC)实验室和南加州大学(USC)国际关系学院将每年为10名本科生提供为期8周的夏季研究体验(SRE)，他们将在那里从事关于安全政治经济学的研究生水平的研究，并参加每周的研究设计、数据科学和专业发展研讨会。该计划将培养新一代领导人，他们的背景不同，在社会科学技能方面处于尖端。作为REU的一部分，我们将承担的相关研究项目处于一个新兴的学术子领域--安全的政治经济学--的前沿。我们的两个主要数据项目--全球军事活动数据集和复杂的经济相互依存数据--为在经济问题上进行强制性讨价还价提供了重要的新衡量标准，使我们能够以细粒度、分类的方式衡量国家之间的经济和军事互动。军事演习、巡逻和危机动员的全面数据集使我们能够确定表明为冲突做好昂贵准备的军事活动的类型，并了解经常发生的强制性讨价还价过程，而这种过程往往没有实际开火。同样，通过准确衡量经济相互依赖的性质，我们可以评估相互依赖在国家之间的强制性讨价还价中既提供力量又提供脆弱性的条件。经济上的相互依赖增加了大规模战争的成本，但矛盾的是，可能会使小规模军事冲突变得更加常见。其中一些较小规模的军事冲突是由与自然资源分配有关的问题推动的。当他们致力于这些项目时，SRE的学生因此处于与政策相关的社会科学的前沿，使用先进的数据科学技术来解决人类面临的一些最紧迫的问题。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project is funded from the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Sites program in the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). It has both scientific and societal benefits, and it integrates research and education. Across the globe, the United States faces a growing set of rapidly evolving, dauntingly complex political challenges. Economic issues sit at the root of both great power conflicts. These challenges are unfolding in a historically novel context. Against this backdrop, participants in this REU will conduct research on the connections between economics and international security, including both the economic incentives for military coercion and war and the coercive uses of economic statecraft. Equipping future scholars to both understand the economic dynamics that drive conflict and propose solutions is critical for pursuing US national interest in an era of economic interdependence. The Security and Political Economy (SPEC) Lab and the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California (USC) will provide ten undergraduates per year with an 8-week summer research experience (SRE), where they will engage in graduate-level research on the political economy of security and attend weekly workshops in research design, data science, and professional development. The program will develop a new generation of leaders who are diverse in their backgrounds and at the cutting edge in their social science skillsets.The interrelated research projects we will undertake as part of the REU sit at the cutting edge of an emerging academic subfield, the political economy of security. Our two major data projects, the Global Military Activity Dataset and the Complex Economic Interdependence Data provide essential new measures of coercive bargaining over economic issues, allowing us to measure, in a fine-grained, disaggregated way, both the economic and military interactions between states. A comprehensive dataset of military exercises, patrols, and crisis mobilizations, allows us to identify the types of military activity that signal costly preparation for conflict, and to understand the process of coercive bargaining that often occurs without shots actually being fired. Similarly, by precisely measuring the nature of economic interdependence, we can then evaluate the conditions under which interdependence provides both power and vulnerability in coercive bargaining between states. Economic interdependence raises the costs of large-scale wars but may, paradoxically, make small-scale military conflicts more common. Some of these smaller-scale military conflicts are driven by issues related to the distribution of natural resources. As they work on these projects, SRE students are thus at the cutting edge of policy-relevant social science, using advanced data science techniques to grapple with some of the most pressing questions facing humanity.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.