Communal violent has shattered the image of Maluku as a socially harmonious community where traditional institutions, such as pela and sasi, have been thought to represent or facilitate inter-group harmony and sustainable resource management. More than three years of sectarian conflict has destroyed settlements and resources, and left many displaced people. It has changed the physical and socia...

What Did the Old Poor Law Really Accomplish? A Redux This paper examines the evolving effects of England’s Old Poor Law (1601-1834). It establishes that poor relief reduced social unrest from around the late-17th century through the turn of the 19th century, at which point it began to spur population growth and its social stability effects dissipated. These conclusions are based on a new datase...

Regimes controlled by a rich elite often collapse and make way for democracy amidst widespread social unrest. Such regime changes are often followed by redistribution to the poor at the expense of the former elite. We argue that the reason why the elite may have to resort to full-scale democratization, despite its apparent costs to themselves, may be that lesser concessions would be viewed as a...

In many instances one may want to gain situational awareness in an environment by monitoring the content of local social media users. Often the challenge is how to build a set of users from a target location. Here we introduce a method for building such a set of users by using an expand-classify approach which begins with a small set of seed users from the target location and then iteratively c...

Efforts at fiscal consolidation are often limited because of concerns over potential social unrest. From German austerity measures during the 1930s to the violent demonstrations in Greece in 2010, hard times have tended to go hand in hand with antigovernment violence. In this paper, I assemble cross-country evidence from eleven South American countries for the period 1937 to 1995 about the exte...

Twitter has become a popular data source as a surrogate for monitoring and detecting events. Targeted domains such as crime, election, and social unrest require the creation of algorithms capable of detecting events pertinent to these domains. Due to the unstructured language, short-length messages, dynamics, and heterogeneity typical of Twitter data streams, it is technically difficult and lab...

Identifying documents that describe a specific type of event is challenging due to the high complexity and variety of event descriptions. We propose a multi-faceted event recognition approach, which identifies documents about an event using event phrases as well as defining characteristics of the event. Our research focuses on civil unrest events and learns civil unrest expressions as well as p...

Abstract We identify a set of potential theoretical mechanisms that link the outbreak and spread communicable diseases to temporal spatial patterns social unrest. Despite proliferation research since 2020 analyzing impact Covid-19 pandemic, we examine broader relationship between less severe epidemic outbreaks their consequences. Epidemics, as well policies governments implement tackle them, of...