Center for International Political Analysis

The Center for International Political Analysis (CIPA) is a research center at the Policy Research Institute (PRI) at the University of Kansas. At present, the project's primary focus is to gather information regarding the nature of inter-state relations during times of conflict in several localized areas, such as the Middle East, Southern, Western, and Central Africa, and the Balkans.

Purpose
By obtaining a series of numeric codes from filtered news, CIPA aims to quantify inter-state relations—both in number and intensity—through computer-aided programming. In addition, CIPA employs several human coders to track mass atrocities throughout the world. CIPA operates with funding from multiple sources with different research needs, although the overarching goal of the project is predictive in nature. The intent of the project's research is to advance efforts in understanding and anticipating civil strife, genocide, and mass killings.

Project history
CIPA is an outgrowth of Philip Schrodt and Deborah Gerner's work on the Kansas Event Data System (KEDS). The initial focus of the KEDS project was the development of techniques for converting English-language reports of political events into event data. This replaced the labor-intensive and error-prone process of human coding with inexpensive, transparent and reproducible automated coding.

The centerpiece of this effort is the KEDS computer program, a program for Macintosh. In support of KEDS, Schrodt and Gerner's staff produced several programs for filtering text and aggregating the resulting event data for its use in statistical analysis. The KEDS program has now been used in about half a dozen National Science Foundation funded event data projects, as well as a number of dissertations and other smaller projects. The development and popularization of the KEDS software paved the way for CIPA's current framework, Tabari.

The early KEDS work focused primarily on the Levant region from the late 1980's to the late 1990's. Most of this research focused on the development of early warning techniques for political change, primarily using the Levant as a case study. The project experimented with a number of different methods, including factor analysis, discriminant analysis, an assortment of clustering algorithms, and hidden Markov models.

In recent years, grants from Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have allowed CIPA to expand the scope of its research into Africa, Yemen, Sri Lanka, and the former Yugoslavia. In addition, these grants have facilitated a shift in CIPA's foci. Upcoming data sets will likely reflect a greater emphasis on contentious intrastate political relations.