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PANDA: a Project to Assess Nonviolent Direct Action

The PANDA project began in 1988 as an attempt to systematically assess the incidence and impact of nonviolent struggle throughout the world. It has continued now for over fourteen years at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, sponsored by the Program on Nonviolent Sanctions through 1994 and thereafter by its successor, the Program on Nonviolent Sanctions and Cultural Survival. The original purpose was to determine under what conditions contemporary nonviolent struggle anywhere in the world had been successful in effecting social, political, or economic change, or in resisting tyranny. To the extent that nonviolent struggle was found, evidence was also sought to determine whether this form of ‘people power’ was spreading.

After a pilot study based on human ‘hand coding’ of global news reports, the project searched for automated tools to facilitate its research. For five years the PANDA team worked with the KEDS (now TABARI) software http://www.ukans.edu/~keds/index.html. Several lessons became clear as we began to assess global news reports of nonviolent struggle. First, nonviolent direct action, no less than violent direct action, was reported in abundance, even by mainstream news media. Second, nonviolent direct action, like its violent counterpart, was variable in its outcomes, with the strategic performance of protagonists, as opposed to the structural asymmetry between authorities and challengers, playing a pivotal role. Third, the tradition of human coding of voluminous electronic news reports posed technical as well as conceptual research challenges, particularly with respect to the unit and level of analysis.

The PANDA project’s systematic analyses of nonviolent struggle began well before the largely nonviolent revolutions that spread throughout Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. Indeed, the PANDA project built upon the early, pioneering work of Gene Sharp, who was affiliated with Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs from the late 1960s through the early 1990s. For more than forty years Sharp (1973) has argued against viewing nonviolent struggle simply as a means of last resort used only by oppressed groups with little left to lose. Recent history certainly has supported his longstanding proposition that nonviolent direct action could be wielded with considerable success, even against powerful and hostile antagonists unlikely to be swayed by moral and emotional appeals. Especially since 1989, many have followed Sharp’s admonition to seek better understandings and further the development of the strategic use of nonviolent action to meet the challenges of tyranny, oppression, and genocide in this post-cold war world.

IDEA: An Event Typology for Automated Events Data Development

Event analysis has a long rich history in international conflict research but, in the past few decades, has been bypassed in favor of simpler methods focusing on general conditions (e.g. the presence of armed conflict) and institutional standards (e.g. human rights protections). This has been due to the difficulty of generating large amounts of high quality data and to limitations in traditional events frameworks, which have often had an inflexible structure and lacked analytic dimensions that could be used for early warning and the study of conflict escalation. The advent of automated coding by such systems as the Kansas Events Data System (KEDS), its successor TABARI (Textual Analysis By Augmented Replacement Instructions), and the VRAâ Knowledge Manager has eliminated the first obstacle. What in the past took months or years to human code can now be done in a matter of weeks with coding reliability that is comparable to human coders.

The PANDA project uses automated coding tools to monitor global news reports on social, political and economic actions. The coding tools used by the project are described at the following website: http://vranet.com/. The IDEA event framework, building directly upon the PANDA Protocol, guides these events data development tools. The IDEA framework thus supersedes the PANDA protocol. IDEA addresses the need for an extensible event framework to support analysis of social, political and economic events, and it integrates all of the PANDA event forms. In a forthcoming article in the Journal of Peace Research (2003) the IDEA framework for international event analysis is presented in more detail. The IDEA framework is in the public domain and is available at http://vranet.com/IDEA. Selected events data from the project is available for noncommercial, academic use from the Harvard-MIT Data Center at http://thedata.org.