WVU researchers use data to understand events that could signal war is coming

Jun. 22—FAIRMONT — In September 2021, a soldier on the India-China border threw a punch.

What followed was a massive fist fight using sticks and stones. The fight took place along the Line of Actual Control, the name of a disputed border area between India and China.

When news media picked up the event, it was disseminated to news outlets around the world and eventually that snippet made its way to the office of Vito D'Orazio, a professor of political science at West Virginia University. While a barroom style brawl between professional soldiers might be amusing, incidents like that can actually serve as an important barometer for predicting the largest tragedy man is capable of inflicting on itself. War.

"Insight into militarized disputes between states is critical, given the reemergence of long-term strategic competition between the U.S. and other global powers, along with the rapid dispersion of new technologies into domains of confrontation," D'Orazio said in a press release. "Data on these events allow interested parties to analyze when low-hostility incidents, such as border fortifications or troop mobilizations, are likely to escalate to higher levels of hostility or to be managed short of that point. Understanding patterns of conflict escalation and de-escalation is critical for informed decision-making."

WVU recently received an $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to expand D'Orazio's work on a dataset known as the Militarized Interstate Dispute Data for the next three years. The dataset is part of the larger Correlates of War Project, which Paul Bezerra, professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy, calls the crown jewel of datasets inside the project.

Bezerra considers Militarized Interstate Dispute Data so highly regarded because it is the one most utilized by their field by number of citation, as well as one that's of interest to policymakers outside of academia. This is the sixth iteration of the dataset, which is periodically updated to ensure it includes the most recent global events. It will span a period between 2014 and 2024. It will also add a new component called MID Live, which can serve as an early detection mechanism for interstate hostilities.

"Vito starts the process," Alex Braithwaite, a professor in international relations at the University of Arizona, said. "The team at West Virginia basically took a big dump of newspaper stories, and they use various algorithms to sort those out and to identify news stories that they think are probably most relevant to the topic that we care about, which is these militarized disputes. He then sends these what we might think of as candidate news stories to be coded by human beings, and the human beings are based here at the University of Arizona, as well as at the US Air Force Academy."

Once the stories are coded, they are sent to the University of Essex, where Faten Ghosn aggregates the news stories into deliverable data sets. Braithwaite said the primary goal is to enable other researchers to carry out political science research into the causes of war.

After 9/11, policymakers shifted their attention to threats posed by terrorists. However, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, concerns about Chinese expansion into the South China Seas, and what's happening between the Houthi rebels and Yemen with support from Iran and Saudi Arabia on each side, the specter of war between countries has arisen again, Braithwaite said.

"I think this is where this data becomes especially useful, because what we're coding are examples of disputes between countries that could escalate to the level of what we would think of as a war between countries," Braithwaite said. "So we're really trying to see whether we can spot the initial sort of murmurs of disputes between countries, so that we could better predict when wars might occur."

D'Orazio and his co-researchers do not track wars themselves. They look at disputes between militarized forces that don't escalate into wider conflict. While a fist fight at the India-China border might count as a MID, other examples might not be as cut and dried.

"Maybe it's like a standard US-Japan drill, some kind of naval drill that you know the countries are working on that North Korea doesn't really like," WVU Graduate Student Jarret Deaton said. Deaton's work is to filter the data. "But, North Korea has been informed, and this drill runs every year, and there's no live firing or anything that breaks the typical mold of how that annual drill is run. That's not really a MID so those don't get counted."

However, if North Korea sends drones to disrupt the drill or fires warning shots, that may make it into the data set.

Bezerra said studying MIDs is important because it gives policymakers something to go on when they wish to avoid conflict. Braithwaite pointed out that MIDs don't escalate into full blown wars when there's more international attention on a particular area of the world.

Nation states invest in resources to avoid conflict through diplomacy or other means. Ukraine might seem like the exception, but Braithwaite said one reason for that may be because Russia began its aggression in 2014 at a time when no one was paying attention. As for Israel and Hamas, he said it was likely because there is no Palestinian state to be the recipient of international attention.

"Bottom line, I think in order to prevent conflicts, in order to de-escalate conflicts, in order to do anything about conflict, you have to be able to have this granular level of detail to understand why different actors are motivated and towards what," Bezerra said.

Studying the data provides options within the policy realm. He explained the notion that war is one point on a larger spectrum of politics.

"In effect, that means you have to study it if you either wish to avoid it entirely," he said. "Or, to make sure that you achieve your ends out of it, if you unfortunately have to get to that stage."

The consequences of not doing so could be catastrophic. After all, it might have just been a fist fight between India and China at the border — a fist fight, between two nuclear powers.

Reach Esteban at efernandez@timeswv.com