This paper introduces the new Family of Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) Datasets, version 2014, which

T his paper theorizes the link between ethnicity and conflict. Conventional research relies on the ethnolinguistic fractionalization index (ELF) to explore a possible causal connection between these two phenomena. However, such approaches implicitly postulate unrealistic, individualist interaction topologies. Moreover, ELF-based studies fail to articulate explicit causal mechanisms of collective action. To overcome these difficulties, we introduce the new index N * of ethnonationalist exclusiveness that maps ethnic configurations onto political violence. This formalization is confirmed statistically in regression analysis based on data from Eurasia and North Africa.

This article introduces GeoEPR, a geocoded version of the Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) dataset that charts politically relevant ethnic groups across space and time. We describe the dataset in detail, discuss its advantages and limitations, and use it in a replication of Cederman, Wimmer and Min’s (2010) study on the causes of ethno-nationalist conflict. We show that territorial conflicts are more likely to involve groups that settle far away from the capital city and close to the border, while these spatial variables have no effect for governmental conflicts.

Although the case-based literature suggests that kin groups are prominent in ethnonationalist conflicts, quantitative studies of civil war onset have both overaggregated and underaggregated the role of ethnicity, by looking at civil war at the country level instead of among specific groups and by treating individual countries as closed units, ignoring groups' transnational links. In this article the authors integrate transnational links into a dyadic perspective on conflict between marginalized ethnic groups and governments. They argue that transnational links can increase the risk of conflict as transnational kin support can facilitate insurgencies and are difficult for governments to target or deter. The empirical analysis, using new geocoded data on ethnic groups on a transnational basis, indicates that the risk of conflict is high when large, excluded ethnic groups have transnational kin in neighboring countries, and it provides strong support for the authors' propositions on the importance of transnational ties in ethnonationalist conflict.

We developed an interactive visualization system that supports analysis and exploration of a large number of indicators that characterize the attractivity of cities in Switzerland. The application is available as a companion to a paper-based publication. This system is embedded in a conceptual framework of best practices in information visualization that we developed over the course of various past projects. It consists of several coordinated views that are tightly integrated, and that successfully reveal the data in its complexity. We present the components of this system, describe design decisions on how to integrate them into an application, and provide details on innovative refinements of various standard information visualization techniques.