Collaborative Research: Using Big Data to Analyze Maritime Conflict

海上冲突在全球范围内呈上升趋势，热点遍布世界各地区。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给予了极大关注，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的空白。首先，它将生成一个关于海上冲突的多方面数据集，并将公开共享，供学者和记者使用。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竞争的说法，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地区的数据收集技术，这些地区也对国家安全产生重大影响。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，综合数据集在推进科学知识方面发挥了关键作用（例如AidData， COW， ACLED）。然而，迄今为止，对海上冲突的系统实证分析有限；一个主要障碍是缺乏数据。在该项目中，pi获取并整合了有关海上事件的综合数据，并在实证检验和解决有关未来十年海上冲突可能如何发展的相互竞争的理论方面取得了实质性进展。考虑到超级大国海上能力缓慢但稳定的变化，以及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存，该项目对权力转移的主流理论进行了提炼，以产生新的可检验的假设。分析利用重叠的专属经济区和领海、近海自然资源分布的变化以及国内政治的变化来检验提出的假设。这些数据将公开提供给其他社会科学家，使他们能够为自己的研究目的复制这些数据。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。

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.