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HRDAG’s Year End Review: 2019

In 2019, HRDAG aimed to count those who haven't been counted.

Guatemala 1993-1999 – Using MSE to Estimate the Number of Deaths

Propelled by the impact of data analysis in El Salvador, Patrick Ball applied his WDWTW model to human rights information in other countries. Throughout the 1990’s, Ball worked at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) analyzing large-scale human rights violations in Ethiopia, South Africa, Haiti and Guatemala. Together with senior scientific colleagues, including statistician Dr. Herb Spirer, Ball developed new methods for analyzing state-sanctioned violence. This chapter documents how the research expanded when a group of nongovernmental organizations in Guatemala asked the scientific community to gather and analyze ...

El Salvador 1991 – Who Did What To Whom?

Members of the Salvadoran military committed tens of thousands of killings during the country’s civil war which raged from the late 1970’s until 1990. While working for a peace organization in El Salvador in 1991, Patrick Ball was asked by a colleague at a human rights group to help organize a large collection of human rights testimonies. Trained as a social scientist, Ball created the “Who Did What To Whom” (WTWTW) model for examining human rights data. Ball used this system to create a structured, relational database of violations reported in more than 9,000 testimonies to the Salvadoran Human Rights Commission. To determine who was most ...

12 Questions about Using Data Analysis to Bring Guatemalan War Criminals to Justice

When people talk about war criminals in Guatemala, which war are they talking about? They’re talking about the Guatemalan civil war, which began in 1960 and ended in 1996. That’s thirty-six years of civil war. Even though it ended almost two decades ago, Guatemala is still recovering from it. At its simplest, this civil war story was right-wing government forces fighting leftist rebels. But it went deeper than that, of course. The majority of the rebel forces was composed of indigenous peoples, primarily the Maya, (more…)

UN Raises Estimate of Dead in Syrian Conflict to 191,000

Nick Cumming-Bruce of the New York Times writes about the UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Right’s release of HRDAG’s third report on reported killings in the Syrian conflict.
From the article:
In its third report on Syria commissioned by the United Nations, the Human Rights Data Analysis Group identified 191,369 deaths from the start of the conflict in March 2011 to April 2014, more than double the 92,901 deaths cited in their last report, which covered the first two years of the conflict.
“Tragically, it is probably an underestimate of the real total number of people killed during the first three years of this murderous conflict,” Ms. Pillay said in a statement that accompanied the report, which observed that many killings in Syria were undocumented.


HRDAG Welcomes Two New Scholars

Paula Amado has joined as a Research Scholar, and María Juliana Durán Fedullo has joined as a Visiting Scholar.

South Africa

Under apartheid, South Africans from all sides suffered violence and human rights abuses. One of the mandates of the the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was to report truth by reporting on violations and victims. Dr. Patrick Ball, as Deputy Director of the Science and Human Rights Program (SHRP) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), used the who-did-what-to-whom data model to provide statistical analysis of the violations reported to the Commission, for use in the final report of the TRC.     Links: http://shr.aaas.org/southafrica/trcsa/ http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/index....

Protecting the Privacy of Whistle-Blowers: The Staten Island Files

HRDAG built a machine-learning tool to strip the raw data of any potentially identifying information such as names and court case numbers. There was no "acceptable error rate."

Funding

HRDAG’s funding comes from private, international donors:  the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Open Society Foundations, an anonymous U.S.-based private foundation, Ford Foundation, The National Endowment for Democracy and individual donors. This funding supports both specific projects, as well as our scientific work generally in human rights data analysis. For the entirety of its existence, HRDAG has been a project of non-profit organizations, first at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and then at Benetech, a non-profit Silicon Valley technology company. In February 2013, HRDAG became ...

Liberia 2009 – Coding Testimony to Determine Accountability for War Crimes

In July 2009, HRDAG concluded a three-year project with the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to help clarify Liberia’s violent history and hold perpetrators accountable. A military coup in 1979 sparked 24 years of civil war in Liberia where warring factions subjected civilians to severe human rights abuses. The TRC sought to determine whether these violations represented a systematic pattern or policy. This chapter describes how HRDAG developed a statistical analysis of the more than 17,000 victim and witness statements collected by the TRC and applied Ball’s “Who Did What To Whom?” methodology. HRDAG scientist Kristen ...

Bangladesh

In December 2006, Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a report documenting torture and unlawful killings committed by Bangladesh's Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), an elite anti-crime and anti-terrorism force. According to HRW, many of the deaths for which RAB is responsible resulted from summary executions or extreme physical abuse. The statistical analysis presented in the report, "Judge, Jury, and Death: Torture and Executions by Bangladesh's Elite Security Force," was conducted by Romesh Silva, a statistician who worked within the Benetech Human Rights Program at the time, and who now works with HRDAG. While researching these incidents, HRW compiled ...

Learning Day by Day: Quantitative Research at the AHPN

Working at the Historic Archive of the National Police (AHPN) of Guatemala, there are many skills I learned on the job. My many years of work on the team that studies the recovered documents have been like a custom-made course in how to do quantitative research. The Archive documents I study are the result of 36 years of creation during civil war (1960 to 1996). Many of these documents are simply administrative—but we are able to use them to understand patterns that occurred during the conflict, to get a sense of what mattered to the National Police and what didn’t. Our quantitative research shows us the Police behavior in broad strokes. ...

Using MSE to Estimate Unobserved Events

At HRDAG, we worry about what we don't know. Specifically, we worry about how we can use statistical techniques to estimate homicides that are not observed by human rights groups. Based on what we've seen studying many conflicts over the last 25 years, what we don't know is often quite different from what we do know. The technique we use most often to estimate what we don't know is called "multiple systems estimation." In this medium-technical post, I explain how to organize data and use three R packages to estimate unobserved events. Click here for Computing Multiple Systems Estimation in R.

HRDAG and #GivingTuesday 2018

Will you help HRDAG advance human rights?

Reflections: Challenging Tasks and Meticulous Defenders

I have made it my personal objective to amplify HRDAG's message of being extra careful and scientifically rigorous with human rights data.

Epidemiology has theories. We should study them.

With so many dashboards and shiny visualizations, how can an interested non-technical reader find good science among the noise?

To Count the Uncounted: An Estimation of Lethal Violence in Casanare,

Tamy Guberek, Daniel Guzmán, Megan Price, Kristian Lum and Patrick Ball, “To Count the Uncounted: An Estimation of Lethal Violence in Casanare,” A Report by the Benetech Human Rights Program. 10 February 2010. (Available in Spanish) © 2010 Benetech. Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.


Measuring lethal counterinsurgency violence in Amritsar District, India using a referral-based sampling technique

Romesh Silva, Jeff Klingner, and Scott Weikart. “Measuring lethal counterinsurgency violence in Amritsar District, India using a referral-based sampling technique.” In JSM Proceedings, Social Statistics Section. Alexandria, VA: American Statistical Association, 2010. © 201o JSM. All rights reserved.


New Study Argues War Deaths Are Often Overestimated


Estimating Undocumented Homicides with Two Lists and List Dependence

Kristian Lum and Patrick Ball. 2015. Human Rights Data Analysis Group (April 2). © 2015 HRDAG.Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.


Our work has been used by truth commissions, international criminal tribunals, and non-governmental human rights organizations. We have worked with partners on projects on five continents.

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