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

该项目由社会，行为和经济科学理事会（SBE）本科生研究经验（REU）站点计划资助。它既具有科学效益，又具有社会效益，它将研究和教育结合在一起。在全球范围内，美国面临着越来越多的迅速演变、令人生畏的复杂政治挑战。经济问题是这两个大国冲突的根源。这些挑战是在一个历史上新颖的背景下展开的。在此背景下，该研究小组的参与者将研究经济与国际安全之间的联系，包括军事胁迫和战争的经济动机以及经济策略的强制使用。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）国际关系学院每年将为10名本科生提供为期8周的暑期研究经验（SRE），在那里他们将从事安全政治经济学的研究生水平研究，并参加研究设计、数据科学和专业发展方面的每周研讨会。该项目将培养新一代的领导者，他们背景多样，在社会科学技能方面处于领先地位。作为REU的一部分，我们将开展的相互关联的研究项目位于新兴学术子领域——安全政治经济学的前沿。我们的两个主要数据项目，全球军事活动数据集和复杂经济相互依存数据，为经济问题上的强制讨价还价提供了重要的新措施，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、巡逻和危机动员的综合数据集使我们能够识别出预示着冲突准备成本高昂的军事活动类型，并了解通常在没有实际开枪的情况下发生的强制性讨价还价过程。同样，通过精确衡量经济相互依赖的本质，我们可以评估相互依赖在国家间强制谈判中既提供力量又提供脆弱性的条件。经济上的相互依赖提高了大规模战争的成本，但矛盾的是，这可能使小规模的军事冲突更加普遍。其中一些小规模的军事冲突是由与自然资源分配有关的问题引起的。在从事这些项目时，SRE的学生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。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.