Complex Emergencies and Politial Instability in Asia

Last September, former Strauss Center Student Fellow Sarah Kaiser-Cross delivered a presentation on the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) at the Department of Defense Minerva Conference. Her presentation provided an overview of the ACLED project, a publicly available geo-referenced dataset on political violence. ACLED is supported by Minerva project funding through the Strauss Center’s CCAPS program, as well as by a European Research Commission grant.

The Strauss Center’s program on Complex Emergencies and Political Stability in Asia (CEPSA) explores the causes and dynamics of complex emergencies in Asia and options for building government capacity to prevent and respond to such situations. CEPSA researchers were active over the summer conducting field research, producing new data on Asian political violence, tracking international aid for disaster response and climate change adaptation, and producing new vulnerability maps.

The August 2015 issue of ACLED-Asia’s Conflict Trends Report focuses on political violence events in Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Nepal, Bangladesh, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The report notes an overall downward trend of politically violent events throughout the subcontinent and Southeast Asia, likely due, in part, to the start of the holy month of Ramadan, which ran from June 17-July 18. In addition to the occurrence of Ramadan, the general decline in the previous quarter continued throughout the summer.

In a recent post for Foreign Policy’s Shadow Government blog, Strauss Center Senior Fellow Rana Siu Inboden discusses the need and opportunity for the Obama Administration to rethink and refocus its Burma policy. In the blog post, “It’s Not Too Late for the Obama Administration to Reboot Reform in Burma,” Inboden argues that U.S. policy has been too quick in rewarding a Burmese regime that has failed to live up to its promises of democratic reform and respect for human rights.