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. Between February and June 2025 I am a Visiting Research Fellow in the Patterns of Conflict Emergence (PaCE) project at Trinity College Dublin. 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 such as violent and nonviolent conflict within and between states. Methodologically, I am interested in forecasting, causal inference, computational social science, and spatial analyses. My work has been published or is forthcoming in the Journal of Peace Research, International Studies Quarterly, and International Interactions. You can find links to working papers, preprints and published papers, supplementary materials, and replication data and code below. You can follow me on Bluesky and (for now still) Twitter/X.
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
Håvard Hegre et al. Online first. “The 2023/24 VIEWS Prediction Challenge: Predicting the Number of Fatalities in Armed Conflict, with Uncertainty”. Journal of Peace Research.
Preprint | Replication files | Prediction Competition Dashboard | Competition Leaderboard
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
“I still haven’t found what I’m looking for: Predicting security-related incidents and conflict fatalities with Google Trends and Wikipedia data” (R&R at Journal of Conflict Resolution)
“Taking time seriously: Predicting conflict fatalities using temporal fusion transformers” with Julian Walterskirchen, Sonja Häffner, and Marco Binetti (R&R at International Interactions)
Streamlit App
“Sharpening blunt instruments: Exploiting non-linearities to enhance identification” with Christopher Schwarz and Sally Sharif (R&R at International Studies Quarterly)
“Automated information extraction from text variables in event datasets with large language models” with Laura Braun
“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
“Mass Reproducibility and Replicability: A New Hope” with Abel Brodeur et al.
“Investigating the analytical robustness of the social and behavioural sciences” with Balazs Aczel et al. (R&R at Nature)
Working papers
“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
“Staying local: The effect of battlefield dynamics on the timing and location of terrorism in civil conflicts”
“Margin of (t)error: Predicting terrorism in civil conflicts for theory building and improvement”
“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”
“The revolution will not be typewritten: Comparing topics among the three generations of the Red Army Faction”
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
“Protest 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
“Addressing bias in subnational conflict research: The PRIO-GRID and the modifiable areal unit problem” with Nils W. Metternich
“Government-issued travel warnings – a result of the past, present, or future? A text analysis approach to crisis communications” with Laura Braun, Tobias Bohne, and Momme Jenzen
“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”
“Predicting Reproducibility and Robustness” with Abel Brodeur et al.
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)