Thomas Leo Scherer

Thomas Leo Scherer

Deputy Director, Center for Peace and Security Studies, UCSD

Posts by Collection

publications

Why the Afghan election still isn’t over

Published in The Washington Post, 2014

Nearly two months after Afghans cast their presidential ballots, the electoral battle continues with the possibility of spiraling into violence. Why have the candidates continued to fight?

Recommended citation: Scherer, Thomas Leo (2014, August 12). "Why the Afghanistan Election Still Isn’t Over", The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/08/12/why-the-afghan-election-still-isnt-over/

The OECD’s fragility index is surprisingly fragile and difficult to reproduce

Published in The Washington Post, 2015

In my attempts to replicate the assessment, I found that the OECD misclassified a large number of states, a mistake that could have real-world repercussions.

Recommended citation: Scherer, Thomas Leo (2015, May 17). "The OECD’s fragility index is surprisingly fragile and difficult to reproduce", The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/05/17/the-oecds-fragility-index-is-surprisingly-fragile-and-difficult-to-reproduce/

The Data Science of COVID-19 Spread: Some Troubling Current and Future Trends

Published in Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy, 2020

The SARS-COV-2 global pandemic has exposed weaknesses throughout our institutions, and the sciences are no exception.

Recommended citation: Douglass, R. W., Scherer, T. L., & Gartzke, E. (2020). The Data Science of COVID-19 Spread: Some Troubling Current and Future Trends, Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy, 26(3), 20200053. doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/peps-2020-0053 https://www.degruyter.com/view/journals/peps/26/3/article-20200053.xml

Introducing the ICBe Dataset: Very High Recall and Precision Event Extraction from Narratives about International Crises

Published in ArXiv preprint, 2022

We introduce a new ontology and dataset of international events called ICBe based on a very high-quality corpus of narratives from the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project.

Recommended citation: Douglass, Rex W., Thomas Leo Scherer, J. Andrés Gannon, Erik Gartzke, Jon Lindsay, Shannon Carcelli, Jonathan Wilkenfeld et al. "Introducing the ICBe Dataset: Very High Recall and Precision Event Extraction from Narratives about International Crises." arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.07081 (2022). https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.07081

research

talks

Peace for Keeps

Published:

From my dissertation, on how UN Peacekeeping Operations affect civil war outcomes. I argue that UNPKOs benefit host governments, and that this is largely due to a selection effect as host governments select into beneficial UNPKOs. I examine the importance of government consent in UNPKO deployment, the relationship between UNPKO presence and government tenure, and the mechanisms through which a government may benefit from a UNPKO.

Download slides here

International Crisis Behavior Event Data

Published:

A first look at the International Crisis Behavior event data. This presentation motivates the project, describes the data collection and cleaning, and provides summary statistics, visualizations, and relations with other ICB characteristics.

Conflict Data: Mapping the Network

Published:

Conflict datasets are explicit about the criteria they are using, but how do we know that they accurately capture what they claim to? How can we compare across conflict datasets when they are using different lenses? We propose using new, massive, semi-structured data such as Wikipedia as a common point of connection to look across different conflict datasets. We match 11 conflict datasets to the wikidata pages that best capture their conflicts. With this, we are able to validate the datasets against each other and identify areas of overlap and possible gaps in their measurement. We discuss what these gaps mean for results based on these datasets.

Working with Conflict Data

Published:

What does the landscape of conflict data look like? How do conflict episode datasets compare? How is conflict event data created? How should we evaluate evidence quality and basic science standards?

teaching

Chemistry and Mathematics

Undergraduate course TA, Cornell University, 2004

Teaching assistant for chemistry and mathematics during Cornell’s Prefreshman Summer Program, 2004 and 2005.

Violent Politics

Undergraduate course TA, Princeton University, Political Science, 2011

Preceptor (TA) for Professor Jacob Shapiro.

Causes of War

Undergraduate course TA, Princeton University, Political Science, 2011

Preceptor (TA) for Professor Gary Bass.