Listed below are brief descriptions of the lab’s Spring 2026 projects. Please note that these projects are subject to frequent changes or removal depending on each faculty’s circumstances/needs, even after the applications are due.
China-U.S.-Taiwan Relations
China and Taiwan have a long-standing dispute about Taiwan’s sovereignty. As China has become militarily stronger over the past few decades the dispute over Taiwan has heated up, and there is uncertainty about what role the US might play in the dispute going forward. Today, policies that sustained a fragile security balance in the past have been changed or are being challenged. This project analyzes this security problem for the purpose of adding to our understanding of international relations in general and to understand what policies might decrease tensions and contribute to a resolution of the dispute. (Led by: Professor Benson)
Social Media and Politics
This project examines the intersection between mis/disinformation on social media and its role in fomenting unrest in the United States. Specifically, teams will focus on scraping raw data from Telegram to understand how white supremacists coordinate protests and violence as well as using YouTube data to see how general mis/disinformation is spread and exacerbated or suppressed by the algorithm. (Led by: Professor Bisbee)
Bureaucratic Repression
Students who work for this team must commit to a regular meeting time of Mondays at 4pm in Commons Center 316.
This project explores the processes by which bureaucrats in all types of states use repression on behalf of national governments, and how that contrasts with the use of violence by government agents. (Led by: Professor Ritter)
Alliances
This project studies the content of military alliances, the optimal design of alliance treaties, and implications for armed conflict. This is for a book project on how alliances might create entangling costs and why those entanglements are, under some circumstances, worth it and, at other times, risky but impossible to avoid. The project studies examples like NATO in addition to examining quantitative data on military alliances throughout history. (Led by: Professor Benson)
Small Arms Trade Networks and Political Violence
This project aims to characterize the political economy of global trade in small arms and light weapons, to show how trade networks are structured and evolve, and to explain how political violence is spread and conserved through these networks. (Led by: Professor Benson)
The Significance of Deaths in Bolivian Political Conflict
What meaning do the deaths suffered in political conflict have for social movements and political change? This project will focus specifically on Bolivia’s political conflict from 1982 to the present. It will use historical research and interviews to build a database of narratives of all the individuals who died in this conflict. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of the database will contribute to our understanding of the political impact of social movements, political and cultural constraints on violence, and the importance of violence and suffering, life and death in the process of social change. (Led by: Professor Bjork-James)
Military Capabilities
This project will identify the military capabilities owned by states around the world in the 20th and 21st century. Building on the Distribution of Military Capabilities (rDMC) Dataset, it will extend the dataset past 2014 and also categorize the military units in a more consistent manner. (Led by: Andres Gannon)
Military Interventions
This project will use wikipedia to identify the military interventions undertaken by non-US states since 1991. Building on the Distribution of Military Capabilities (rDMC) Dataset, it will produce a list of Wikipedia pages to be scraped using automated text analysis methods and then structured into a useable database. (Led by: Andres Gannon)
Cyber Power
Existing measures of national cyber power are opaque and inconsistent in what they consider relevant for a country’s cyber capacity. This project aims to identify the factors that explain why some countries are better or worse at cyber conflict, both offensively and defensively. (Led by: Andres Gannon)
National Security Strategies
This project will produce a new dataset of published national security strategy documents over the past half century. Text analysis methods can then be applied to identify how states’ national security strategies change over time and when they are similar or different from the public statements of other states. (Led by: Andres Gannon)
Humanitarianism and Media Coverage in Immigration Crises
How and why do individuals’ immigration attitudes shift in response to immigration crises? This project seeks to document how news coverage and issue frames change over time in response to a major migrant sending event, focusing on the Colombian media in the wake of the Venezuelan migrant crisis. Research assistants will work with Alec to 1) establish and refine a codebook and 2) read through Colombian newspaper articles and categorize them into certain topics using the codebook. Research assistants should be advanced or fluent in Spanish. This project will give research assistants firsthand experience with text analysis methods and provide a substantive overview of both immigration politics and the influence of the media on outgroup attitudes. (Led by: PhD Candidate Alec Tripp)
Micro-dynamics of Civil War Violence
What roles do the decisions of individuals–both civilians and combatants–play in shaping the violent trajectory of civil wars? In this project, we will collect fine-grained data on civilians-led protests and migration patterns during wartime. We will also collect biographical information of combatants to construct organizational networks of armed groups, which will be used to analyze when and why we observe cooperation instead of ceasefire or violent competition between armed adversaries. (Led by: PhD Candidate Nguyen Ha)
Administration and Outreach
This team spearheads recruitment efforts, manages ROCCA’s on-campus and online presence, organizes events, and assists faculty mentors with grant applications, among other lab affairs.
Informal Institutions and Development after Domestic Conflict
Understanding development and inequality requires examining only formal but also informal institutions. In this ROCCA team, we will collect data that helps investigate the interplay between both types, focusing mostly on the most foundational and ubiquitous type of informal norm-based system: kinship (family, friendship, camaraderie, etc.). This is a broad topic, meaning the task could range from working with information on revolutionary families in Latin America, to creating original biographical data about the American businessmen and their ties with political elites following the Civil War. (Led by: PhD Candidate Federico Lombisano)
The Time Horizons of Repression
A Theory of Strategic Sterilization: Existing research acknowledges that repression can take a preventive form; however, much of the literature emphasizes deterring immediate dissent rather than strategies that reshape future mobilization. This project explores the concept of long-term preventive repression, specifically sterilization, as a forward-looking strategy whereby states alter the demographic foundations of resistance. We will analyze qualitative evidence from online archives on the Holocaust and on the sterilization of Indigenous women in Peru and Puerto Rico to assess when sterilization was used strategically and why. Students will help process-trace archival sources, build timelines, and identify decision-makers’ incentives and constraints.
Slowing Down Nuclear Proliferation
Students who work for this team must commit to a regular meeting time of Tuesdays at 5pm in Commons Center 316.
Students will analyze particular countries’ history of interest in, and progress toward, developing nuclear weapons, in order to identify and document the ways in which the nuclear nonproliferation regime (NPR) has discouraged interest or impeded progress. Would states that sought nuclear capabilities have started sooner, or made progress faster, in the absence of the NPR? Would some states that never sought nukes decide to do so if it weren’t for the NPR? (Led by: Dr. Andrew Coe)
Indigenous Culture and Collective Resistance in Argentina
This project examines how precolonial Indigenous cultural traits (particularly those related to warfare and conquest) continue to influence patterns of collective resistance against extractive activities in certain regions of Argentina today. (Led by: Jorge Mangonnet)
Sub-national Nonstate Actor Governance (SNAG)
This project develops new tools to measure how governments and rebel groups control and govern territory within conflict zones. Using open-source text, machine learning, and natural language processing, SNAG produces fine-grained, time-varying data on local territorial control, capturing changes that traditional event-based measures miss. The resulting dataset enables new research on the dynamics of conflict, the effectiveness of development aid in contested areas, and the long-term consequences of insurgent governance for postwar state-building. ( Led by: Nina McMurry)