Christian Oswald

Research Associate

Center for Crisis Early Warning

About Me

Welcome! 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, 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]

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]

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”

“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

Working papers

“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”

“I still haven’t found what I’m looking for: Predicting conflict fatalities and security-related incidents with Google Trends and Wikipedia data”

“Listening to the wind of change: Using Wikipedia page changes to measure and predict contentious politics”

“Identification at scale: Exploiting first stage heterogeneity in instrumental variables designs” with Christopher Schwarz

Replication reports

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 and Marcella Morris

“Outsourcing war: The strategic logic behind choosing pro-government militias or private military contractors” with Nadine O’Shea

“Enhancing Conflict Prediction: Investigating Temporal Dynamics and Spatial Dependencies through Deep Learning and Transformer-Based Architectures” with Julian Walterskirchen, Sonja Häffner, and Marco Binetti

“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

Public scholarship

Oswald, Christian, and Daniel Ohrenhofer: Using Wikipedia for conflict forecasting. ECPR’s The Loop. 19 July 2022.

Oswald, Christian, Melanie Sauter, Sigrid Weber, and Rob Williams: Civilian Victimization and Rebel Territorial Control in Sierra Leone. The Quantitative Peace. 13 April 2020.