Seminar Abstract 

There is an ongoing debate on the effectiveness of quantitative analysis in social science. In particular, the methodological debates in International Relations (IR) are much more intense than those in other social sciences because IR scholars tend to emphasise abstract concepts such as power, war, and peace, all of which are hard to be quantified. In this presentation, we focus on the measure of peace, demonstrating the benefits and limits of several peace indexes. As a complementary approach, we propose combining the big data analysis with existing peace data.

About the Speakers

Jung Wook Son is a Research Fellow at Jeju Peace Institute (JPI). He received his PhD from Seoul National University and was awarded the best PhD dissertation of the year by Korean Political Science Association (KPSA). He had previously worked for National Assembly of South Korea as a policy advisor for ten years. His research interests are in the areas of international and comparative political economy, deindustrialisation and party politics, quantitative methods, and international cooperation in East Asia. His current research projects focus on labor market dualisation and measuring peace index in East Asia.

Jong Hee Park is a Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Seoul National University and Director of Global Data Center at Institute of International Studies, Seoul National University. He received PhD from Washington University in St. Louis and was an assistant professor at University of Chicago. His research interests lie in the fields of political methodology and international political economy. He also maintains MCMCpack and Bayesian task view in CRAN. He is currently working on dynamic network analysis, and change point analysis of Bayesian shrinkage models.

About the Discussants

Su-Hyun Lee is an Assistant Professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research interests lie in the fields of international and comparative political economy with a focus on the domestic politics of foreign economic policy and (re)distributive politics. She is currently working on a book project that explores the political dynamics of US trade policy. Her other research projects examine the consequences of global economic integration, including the electoral effects of localised trade shocks, the skill-bias of tariff protection, and the impact of the IMF programs on collective labor rights. Her work has appeared in Political Science Research and Methods.

Stein Tønnesson is research professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), associate editor for Asia in the Journal of Peace Research, and member of the editorial board of Global Asia. His areas of research are peace in East Asia, nation-building in Southeast Asia, conflict in the South China Sea, revolution and war in Vietnam, and the role of social media in Myanmar’s internal armed conflicts. During 2011–17 he led the East Asian Peace program at the University of Uppsala, from which he published the monograph Explaining the East Asian Peace (NIAS Press 2017) and the book chapters ‘Peace by Development’ in E. Bjarnegård & J. Kreutz, eds. Debating the East Asian Peace (NIAS Press, 2017) and ‘The East Asian Peace’ in T. Inoguchi, ed. The SAGE Handbook on Asia Foreign Policy (SAGE, 2020).