I am a Research Associate at the Center for Crisis Early Warning at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich, and a member of the Research School on Peace & Conflict at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. I earned my PhD from the Department of Political Science at Trinity College Dublin. In addition, I hold a B.A. and M.A. in Political Science from the University of Mannheim and an M.A. in International Relations (Research Track) from the University of Nottingham.
My research interests are explaining and predicting political violence and instability. This includes, but is not limited to, terrorism & insurgencies and civil & international conflict. Methodologically, I am interested in both frequentist and Bayesian statistics, computational social science, and spatial analyses. My dissertation seeks to explain and predict the adoption, timing, and location of terrorism in civil conflicts. My work has been published in International Studies Quarterly and International Interactions. You can find preprints, supplementary materials, replication code and data for my published work on my OSF profile and Dataverse.
Interests
- Political violence & instability
- International & civil conflict
- Quantitative methods
- Computational social science
- Prediction
- Causal inference
Education
PhD in Political Science
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
MA in International Relations (Research Track)
University of Nottingham, United Kingdom
MA in Political Science
University of Mannheim, Germany
BA in Political Science
University of Mannheim, Germany
Research
Peer-reviewed publications
Christian Oswald and Daniel Ohrenhofer. 2022. Click, click boom: Using Wikipedia data to predict changes in battle-related deaths. International Interactions 48(4): 678-696.
Preprint | Replication files | Supplementary materials | ECPR’s The Loop
Christian Oswald, Melanie Sauter, Sigrid Weber and Rob Williams. 2020. Under the Roof of Rebels: Civilian Targeting After Territorial Takeover in Sierra Leone. International Studies Quarterly 64(2): 295-305.
Preprint | Replication files | Supplementary materials | The Quantitative Peace
Papers under review
“Staying local: The effect of battlefield dynamics on the timing and location of terrorism in civil conflicts”
“The revolution will not be typewritten: Comparing topics among the three generations of the Red Army Faction”
“Sharpening blunt instruments: Exploiting non-linearities to enhance identification” with Christopher Schwarz and Sally Sharif
“Taking time seriously: Predicting conflict fatalities using temporal fusion transformers” with Julian Walterskirchen, Sonja Häffner, and Marco Binetti
“The night before or the morning after: Coup risk, failed coup attempts, and minister removals in autocracies” with Marco Binetti, Christoph Dworschak, Sonja Häffner, and Julian Walterskirchen
“The 2023/24 VIEWS Prediction Challenge: Predicting the Number of Fatalities in Armed Conflict, with Uncertainty” with Håvard Hegre, Paola Vesco, Michael Colaresi, Jonas Vestby, et al.
“Mass Reproducibility and Replicability: A New Hope” with Abel Brodeur, Derek Mikola, et al.
Working papers
“Margin of (t)error: Predicting terrorism in civil conflicts for theory building and improvement”
“Listening to the wind of change: Predicting protest dynamics in autocracies using Wikipedia page changes”
“Identification at scale: Exploiting first stage heterogeneity in instrumental variables designs” with Christopher Schwarz and Sally Sharif
“Caught up in the moment: The effect of changes in territorial control on the timing, location and intensity of state-based and one-sided violence in civil conflicts”
Replication reports
Christian Oswald and Julian Walterskirchen. 2024. Computational and robustness reproducibility of “UN Peacekeeping and Democratization in Conflict-Affected Countries”. I4R Discussion Paper No. 138.
Preprint | Replication files | Supplementary materials
Christian Oswald, Julian Walterskirchen, Sonja Häffner, Marco Binetti and Christoph Dworschak. 2023. Replication of The Morning After: Report from the Nottingham Replication Games. I4R Discussion Paper No. 45.
Preprint | Replication files | Supplementary materials
Work in progress
“Common enemies make strange bedfellows: Peacekeeping presence and inter-rebel dynamics in civil war” with Christoph Dworschak, Jenniina Kotajoki, and Marcella Morris
“Resistance in the Streets, Data in the Sheets: A conceptual and empirical appraisal of protest event data” with Christoph Dworschak, Hannah Frank, Maxine Leis, and Maurice Schumann
“Outsourcing war: The strategic logic behind choosing pro-government militias or private military contractors” with Nadine O’Shea
“A change is gonna come: Predicting anti-government protest onsets in autocracies by issue area with Wikipedia page changes”
“Wikipedia page changes as fine-grained measure of contention and controversy”
Teaching
Instructor
- Fall 2021: International Conflict (Postgraduate)
- Fall 2021: Contemporary International Relations (Undergraduate)
- Fall 2021: Research Methods for Political Science (Undergraduate)
Teaching Assistant
- 2018-2021: International Relations (Undergraduate)
- 2017-2018: Introduction to Political Science (Undergraduate)