Selected Working Papers and Projects

The Ethnicization of Syria’s Conflict: A Social Media Analysis (with Alexandra Siegel and Deen Freelon)
Ethnic conflicts are often seen as especially violent and intractable. But how and why do some conflicts become “ethnic”? Drawing on the ethnic politics literature, we propose a research design for a large-scale, systematic study of the ethnicization of conflict. We propose analyzing the online and real-world spread of ethnic narratives, frames, and interpretations of the Syrian civil war, which began as an anti-regime revolution and took on an increasingly ethno-sectarian hue. We develop a new conceptual and methodological framework to systematically map Syria’s pre-conflict ethnic structure and then use Twitter data and machine learning methods to measure ethnicization. This approach enables us to advance the constructivist literature on ethnicity and conflict by empirically testing the drivers of the ethnicization and de-ethnicization of conflict. Taking advantage of our temporally granular, networked, and georeferenced data, this project is also expected to contribute to a growing body of literature using social media data to study the microdynamics of conflict more broadly.