SECReT 2010 PhD projects
- Metal oxide semiconductor gas sensors as an electronic nose for the detection of microbial agents
- What are the factors that make communities vulnerable to, or resistant against, the emergence of radicalising settings?
- Covert taggant nanoparticle inks - discovery, process and product development, and analysis for sustainability and efficiency
- Diffusion processes of political violence: The role of information
- Engineering IT risk awareness, education and training
- Three-dimentional imaging of baggage for security applications.
- Understanding the traffic-driven epidemic spreading in scale-free networks
- Optimal search and detection of targets in an uncertain environment using unmanned aerial vehicle
- Explosive residue: Evaluation and optimisation of detection and sampling procedures
- Forecasting adversary’s scenarios: Systemic competitive red teaming
- Secure digital archive and web search using a Probably Approximately Correct architecture
- Mobilising community resilience through techno-social innovation
- Numerical modelling/empirical analysis of civil conflict
- Landmine, IED, UXO Detection using Ground Penetrating Radar from an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
- Towards a usable and less disruptive security in the workplace
- Securing from exploits using information theoretical techniques
- Crime drop in Chile: Searching for causes and mechanisms
- Inferring user behaviour despite wireless network encryption
- The Chain of Evidence - a critical appraisal of the applicability and validity of forensic research and the usability of forensic evidence
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Numerical modelling/empirical analysis of civil conflict
7 March 2012
Civil wars are highly complex. They create large-scale humanitarian crises and result in economic instability, retarded economic growth and development failure. Policy-makers have focused their efforts on how best to deal with civil unrest and it is clear that the study of global security and conflict is vital. The multi-factorial aspects of conflict make its study amenable to a range of disciplines. For example, the damaging effects of civil conflict can diffuse into both neighbouring regions and internationally, thus making political violence a concern within the fields of geography and international relations. If wars are viewed as systemic failures in domestic political processes, they are also of much concern to political scientists and since conflict destroys productive capacity and retards economic growth, it is of similar interest to economists.
The economic theories attempting to quantify the motives for rebellion are divided into two main categories, namely ‘greed’ and ‘grievance’. Recent academic findings have strongly influenced the popularity of greed-based explanations for civil conflict. This has led to a consensus among policy-makers that grievance-based rebellion is relatively insignificant. However, there is an increasing body of opinion that suggests it is too soon to dismiss inequality-based motives.
The aim of this research is to assess how grievances assist in the formation of rebellion/terrorist groups. The intention is to apply methods and theories from the physical sciences (such as numerical modelling, complexity science and network approaches) to the study of rebel/terrorist group formation.
