The compilation of the IPI Security Council Compliance Database entered into a new phase on May 22, 2009 as twenty-five doctoral students began systematically assessing compliance by civil-war parties with more than 1,500 specific demands issued by the UN Security Council to them in the context of twenty-five recent civil wars.

Today the majority of the coders came to New York to attend a full-day training workshop at IPI’s Trygve Lie Center for Peace, Conflict and Development. The remaining coders will go through a similar training in the coming weeks.

The twenty-five students currently pursue doctoral studies focused on conflict studies and/or conflict management. During their graduate studies, each of them has extensively researched the specific civil war they will examine further for IPI. Over the coming months, they will work as consultants for IPI, assessing compliance with all demands to civil war parties that were issued in UN Security Council resolutions during the first fifteen years after the Cold War (1989-2003).

The doctoral students will evaluate the level of compliance with each demand both in the short and medium terms as well as the ‘depth’ of action required by each demand. Each score will be accompanied by quotations from primary and secondary sources that form the basis of the assessment. The assessments and the background material will be published online in the IPI Security Council Compliance Database. To mitigate the risks associated with the subjectivity of each expert coder’s assessment, each coding decision was assigned to two doctoral students working independently.

The full-day training workshop familiarized the expert coders with the rigorous methodology developed for the evaluation of compliance with UN Security Council resolutions by Christoph Mikulaschek, Senior Policy Analyst at IPI. A methodological manual will be published together with the IPI Security Council Compliance Database in 2011.

The following doctoral students will work as expert coders for IPI’s project on Understanding Compliance with UN Security Council Resolutions in Civil Wars:

Fernando Chinchilla, Université de Montréal
Will Clegg, St. Paul’s College
Teresa Cravo, Harvard University & University of Cambridge
Dan Fahey, University of California, Berkley
Renee Gendron, University of Amsterdam
Patricia Gossman, Afghanistan Justice Project
Brent Hierman, Indiana University
Chelsea Johnson, University of California, Berkley
Chen Kertcher, Tel-Aviv University
Natacha Lemasle, Northwestern University & Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris
Megan MacKenzie, Harvard University
Sarah-Myriam Martin-Brûlé, McGill University
Cynthia Michota, Georgia State University
Madalena Moita, Complutense University
Mateja Peter, University of Cambridge
Philippe Rieder, Concordia University
Cyrus Samii, Columbia University
Lindsey Scorgie, University of Cambridge
Lee Seymour, Harvard University
David Siroky, Duke University
Kimairis L. Toogood, George Mason University
Daniel Millan Valencia, University of Essex
Charlotte Walker, Yale University
Jeni Whalan, University of Oxford
Carla Winston, US Institute of Peace