A Quantitative Analysis of ‘Root Causes of Conflict’

This chapter describes a method for the measurement of root causes of conflicts, as defined in a checklist drawn up by the European Commission’s External Relations Directorate General (DG RELEX) for monitoring and early warning. Our approach uses Latent Semantic Analysis to measure these conflict indicators on a corpus composed of news articles extracted from the archive of a media monitoring system, Europe Media Monitor (EMM), designed at the European Commission’s Joint Research Center (JRC). Latent Semantic Analysis is a statistical technique based on the analysis of the semantic similarity between words distributed across a corpus of documents. By taking a purely numerical approach to estimating these conflict indicators in news data, we have produced results that could be further used in foreign policy analysis and conflict assessment tasks and could provide timely alerts to policy-makers and analysts.