Working Groups provide a great opportunity to participate in a focused discussion around specific topic areas with a diverse group of scholars. By participating in a working group, conference attendees discuss the most thought-provoking issues in their section as well as their own research through an extended and focused discussion.
Global Trends in War, Conflict, and Political Violence
Sponsored By The International Security Studies Section
Organized by Jon Western and Kavita Khory
The year 2014 marks the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I. Over the past century, we have witnessed episodes of extreme interstate and intrastate violence as well as a more recent period of relative stability. This working group will bring together a group of scholars from a diverse set of theoretical, methodological, and geographical approaches to look at the broad trends in interstate war, intrastate war, and political violence over the past century, where we are today, and what the future trends might look like.
Forecasting International Events
Sponsored By The Scientific Study of International Processes Section
Organized by Curtis S. Signorino and Jeffrey Arnold
Interest has been rapidly growing in forecasting international events. This growing interest is part of a wider societal interest in predictive analytics, itself driven by the ‘big data’ revolution. While the questions of interest in international relations are complex and fundamentally difficult to predict, international relations researchers now have dramatically more data and computational power than at any time in the past, and this ability is growing exponentially. Given these dramatic changes in the technology available to researchers, we propose bringing together leading international relations scholars with a wide variety of interests and a wide variety of methodological approaches but with a common interest in prediction.