Summer Lab Research Spotlights Humanitarian Disarmament
Human Security Lab’s summer program has kicked off with an emphasis on humanitarian disarmament. This year the Lab has employed four undergraduate researchers and two doctoral researchers on an array of projects dealing with nuclear weapons, cluster munitions and landmines. The lab, an interdisciplinary initiative between Political Science, Economics and Psychology and Brain Sciences, provides a unique learning opportunity in research methods and human security issues for undergraduates, as well as an incubator for advanced research by graduate students.
Humanitarian disarmament is an important area in human security policy where global civil society, states, and other groups come together to regulate or outlaw weapons that have devastating humanitarian consequences, such as chemical weapons, biological weapons, or incendiary weapons. A particular area of interest for the Lab this summer is the effect of disarmament treaties on actors who don’t sign them. Projects underway at Human Security Lab this summer include working papers on the new Nuclear Ban Treaty and the Convention Against Cluster Munitions, as well as a new data-gathering project on the use of land mines by armed groups.
Undergraduate researchers were recruited this year from the Conflict and Security Special Topics class in political science. Isha Mahajan, Jacqueline Shortsleeve, Leoni Foster, and Helen Eshetu participated in a team effort on the nuclear ban treaty project, developing and refining a code scheme to analyze the open ended comments from a set of survey experiments on the effectiveness of the new Nuclear Ban Treaty. The analysis feeds into a working paper underway by Professor Carpenter and Professor Liedner. For the students, the project is an opportunity not only to learn about international law, and better understand how American citizens think about ethical nuances of nuclear use, but also to learn how to make rigorous social science inferences from qualitative data. The students participated in a three-day training in qualitative data analysis software NVivo with the Institute of Social Science Research, and participated in a revolving series of Zoom meetings to discuss how to code the data, paying careful attention to measures of inter-coder reliability.
At other times this summer, undergraduates have assisted in a separate data- gathering project on land mines used by armed groups. Currently such data is in its infancy, with most datasets focused on the use of landmines by states. Doctoral researchers associated with Human Security Lab are building the dataset as part of a project on the relationship between women’s participation in armed groups and compliance with international humanitarian law. Recent UMass graduate and rising Master of Science student in Data Analytics Isha Mahajan called her work at the Lab “exciting and engaging… learning various aspects of qualitative research and exploring new data to find and answer interesting research questions.”
Another treaty where important effects might be seen on non-state parties is the treaty banning the use, stockpiling, transfer and production of question munitions. Doctoral researcher Joseph Tyler Lovell and graduate researcher Nathan Trin-Tranh have been working with Professor Carpenter this summer on a data set tracking compliance with the Cluster Munition Convention by non-state parties and revising a working paper to be submitted to a journal this fall. Their paper, “Beyond Compliance: The Effects and Effectiveness of the Cluster Munitions Treaty” was presented at the Conflict, Violence, and Security Workshop last spring and is slated for submission to a major journal this fall.
Lab Director Professor Charli Carpenter is excited by the chance to work with students in the summer. “There’s nothing like watching science come alive through the interactions between bright young minds. And if the results of our research can empower humanitarian disarmament campaigners to build a more safer world, then that is what science is all about!”