Collaborative Research: Using Big Data to Analyze Maritime Conflict

全球海上冲突呈上升趋势，全球各地区都是海上冲突热点。尽管新闻媒体和智库的报道越来越多，政策制定者和政界人士也非常关注，但有关海上冲突事件的系统数据有限。这个项目将填补两个重要空白。首先，它将生成一个多方面的海上冲突数据集，供学者和记者公开分享使用。其次，尽管理论家们对海上冲突领域的预期提出了许多相互矛盾的解释，但对于过去十年发生的事情，还没有任何令人信服的实证调查。该项目将开发适用于一系列受海上冲突影响的地区的数据收集技术，这些地区也具有重大的国家安全影响。社会科学家越来越多地转向数据驱动的方法来回答有关国际安全的重要问题。在冲突研究领域，综合数据集在促进科学知识方面发挥了关键作用(例如，AidData、COW、ACLED)。然而，到目前为止，对海上冲突的系统性实证分析有限；一个主要障碍是缺乏数据。在这个项目中，私人投资机构获取和整合关于海上事件的全面数据，并在经验上测试和解决关于未来十年海上冲突可能如何发展的相互矛盾的理论方面取得实质性进展。该项目完善了主流的权力过渡理论，考虑到超级大国海上能力缓慢但稳定的变化，以及自冷战结束以来民族国家之间日益增长的经济和政治相互依赖，以产生新的可验证的假设。该分析利用专属经济区和领海的重叠、近海自然资源分布的变化以及国内政治的变化来检验所提出的假设。这些数据将公开并可供其他社会科学家阅读，这样专家就可以复制这些数据用于自己的研究目的。这一奖项反映了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。

Maritime conflict has been on the rise globally, with hotspots across the world's regions. Despite growing coverage in the news media, among think tanks, and great attention from policy makers and politicians, there is limited systematic data on conflict incidents in maritime regions. This project will fill two important gaps. First, it will generate a multi-faceted dataset on maritime conflict that will be shared publicly for use by scholars and journalists. Second, although theorists have offered many competing accounts for what to expect in the realm of maritime conflict, there have yet to be any compelling empirical investigations of what has taken place in the past decade. This project will develop data collection techniques that will be applicable to a range of maritime conflict-affected regions, which also have substantial national security implications.Social scientists have increasingly turned to data-driven approaches to answer important questions regarding international security. Within the world of conflict research, comprehensive datasets have played a critical role in advancing scientific knowledge (e.g. AidData, COW, ACLED). Thus far, however, there has been limited systematic empirical analysis of maritime conflict; a major hurdle is a lack of data. In this project, the PIs acquire and consolidate comprehensive data on maritime incidents and make substantial progress toward empirically testing and resolving competing theories for how maritime conflict may play out over the next decade. The project refines prevailing theories of power transition, taking into account the slow but steady change in maritime capabilities of superpowers as well as the growing economic and political interdependence among nation-states since the end of the Cold War, to generate new testable hypotheses. The analysis utilizes the overlapping EEZ zones and territorial waters, variation in off-shore natural resource distribution, and changes in domestic politics to test the proposed hypotheses. The data will be made publicly available and legible to other social scientists so that experts can replicate it for their own research purposes.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.