Prof. Dr. Constantin Ruhe - Research Projects

The Impact of Social Structure, Discrimination and Violence on the German Muslim Community

(Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), 2021-2024; Project Team: Sigrid Roßteutscher (Goethe University Frankfurt), Constantin Ruhe (Goethe University Frankfurt), Richard Traunmüller (University of Mannheim))

The religiosity and religious identity of Western European Muslims has received increasing attention in academic research and public discourse. Yet, despite extensive research over the past decade, Muslims' strong preservation of religious traditions remains an unsolved pattern in Western European immigration societies. A dominant explanation of religious identity is the discrimination or exclusion of Muslim immigrants by the majority population. However, beyond the often individually experienced discrimination in everyday situations, Muslim individuals are subject to a more severe and increasingly visible form of xenophobia: violence and acts of terror, which explicitly target Muslims indiscriminately. Moreover, radical Islamic terror organizations try to fuel this vicious cycle. Caught between a faction of radicalized Muslims as well as hostile, islamophobic elements of the majority population, secular segments of the Muslim population are in an awkward position, where they feel resentment and pressure from different sides.Surprisingly, however, we have very little empirical research on how this two-pronged threat of violence affects Muslims in Germany. The proposed research project addresses core questions within this research gap: How does religiously motivated violence alter religious identity? How does identity, discrimination and violence affect civic or political behavior? And how do these reactions vary with the social position which individuals occupy? After all, social mobility has fundamentally altered and diversified German society, including the largest Muslim-origin immigrant group, the Turkish guestworker communities. Today, many Muslim-origin immigrants of all generations hold a wide range of positions in politics, economy and society, with the result that religion cross-cuts many other dimensions which are potentially relevant to individuals' social identity.We build on the theoretical framework of the overarching RISS research and expand it by illuminating how exogenous events, such as Islamist and anti-Muslim violence, perturb the association between social structure, identity and behavior. The proposed project examines these questions using an original survey of German Muslims, which we will collect as part of the RISS Internalization Survey. We rely on innovative measurement strategy using a conjoint experiment to estimate the importance of religion within individuals' multidimensional social identity. Furthermore, our proposed empirical analysis uses an experimental design to evaluate how social identity as well as political preferences and behavior are linked to perceptions of violence and discrimination. (Project Page)


What can we agree upon? Theorizing and modelling peace agreement content, compromise ability and their effects on armed intrastate conflicts.

(Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), 2021-2023; Project Team: Constantin Ruhe (Principal Investigator), Meri Dankenbring (Project Researchers), Iris Volg (Project Researcher))

Recent research argues that peace agreements in armed intrastate conflicts are more stable and prolong peace if they contain specific provisions, such as powersharing, justice measures or information-sharing mechanisms. Surprisingly, however, very little research analyzes when and why we see specific peace agreement content in the first place. This research project addresses these gaps and develops a comprehensive theoretical framework of peace negotiations, agreement content and their joint effect on conflict behavior in armed intrastate conflicts. To this end, it connects and expands research on mediation, peace agreements and disaggregated conflict dynamics. The framework generalizes insights from mediation research and argues that conflict parties' ability to reach a compromise is a central, but thus far unobserved variable, which determines both the content and the impact of peace agreements. The project will break new ground by developing a measurement model from the theoretical framework, which will enable us to quantify compromise ability in civil conflicts worldwide. Based on this new data, the project explains and models specific agreement content and its effects.


The civilian dimension of peacekeeping operations and human rights promotion

(Funding: Swedish Research Council; Project Team: Sabine Otto (Uppsala University, Project Leader), Constantin Ruhe (Goethe University Frankfurt), Hannah Smidt (University of Zurich), Lisa Hultman (Uppsala University), Jair van der Lijn (SIPRI))

United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations have become one of the most prominent responses to civil wars around the world. The role of civilian personnel and their activities have proliferated during the last two decades and become increasingly central, whereby the promotion of human rights is one of the core function of UN peacekeeping operations. Our knowledge, however, about the impact of civilian staff and activities on protecting human rights standards is inconclusive and the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. We explore whether and how the civilian components of UN peacekeeping operations improve human rights standards. To achieve this goal, we disaggregate the civilian dimension of peacekeeping operations into civilian personnel and their activities. Empirically, we collect and analyze novel data that disaggregates peacekeeping operations along these key dimensions. By using statistical methods that exploit between- and within- country variation, we examine whether and how the different civilian components affect peacekeeping operations' ability to improve human rights practices. The results from the project will generate valuable insights into how to design more effective peacekeeping operations. (Project Page)


Reducing root causes of forced displacement and managing migration

(Associated researcher at the German Development Institute)

This project addresses the multidimensional (multivariate) causes and explanatory factors of forced migration, and investigates the sustainability of different strategies for managing forced migration and flight. It also uses examples of two African sub-regions (East Africa, West Africa) to examine the potential for regional, national and sub-national policies to support a development-oriented approach to managing regular migration.

Project papers

  • Digitalisation in the lives of urban migrants: Evidence from Bogota (with Charles Martin-Shields, Sonia Camacho and Rodrigo Taborda) - forthcoming in Policy & Internet
  • The Asylum Hump: Unpacking why country income level predicts asylum seeking, but not new refugee numbers (with Charles Martin-Shields and Lisa Groß) - forthcoming in Journal of Refugee Studies
  • How migration intentions change during periods of political instability and violence: Panel survey evidence from Kenya - forthcoming in Migration Studies
  • Who intends to leave? Global survey evidence how individual migration intentions differ between conflict-affected and peaceful contexts (with Jana Kuhnt) – under review

Measuring violence and emergent hostility in ongoing civil wars using reimbursed mobile phone surveys

(joined work with Sebastian Schutte and Andrew Linke)

The project aims at measuring and monitoring inter-group hostilities in ongoing civil conflicts to investigate how individual attitudes towards out-groups covary with experienced violence. The research is based on a social-psychological framework and the recent turn in the civil conflict literature toward grievance-based explanations for mobilization. To test observable implications of the theory, we employ a new computer system for conducting reimbursed electronic surveys in low-intensity conflicts in both Kenya and India.

Project papers

  • How indiscriminate violence fuels religious conflict: Evidence from Kenya (with Sebastian Schutte and Andrew Linke) – forthcoming in Social Science Research, SocArXiv version
  • How fear of violence drives intergroup conflict: Evidence from a panel survey in India (with Sebastian Schutte and Niranjan Sahoo) - forthcoming in Terrorism & Political Violence, [Open access journal version]

Visualizing and interpreting time-varying effects from duration models

The most commonly used duration models assume that covariate effects remain constant over time. This assumption is often violated in political science analyses with long observation times. While modeling such time-varying effects is easy to implement, the interpretation is not intuitive and prone to severe inferential errors. I study the merits and limitation of existing interpretation and visualization techniques and develop methods and software tools that help applied researchers to interpret estimation results correctly.

Project papers:

  • Estimating survival functions after stcox with time-varying coefficient – published by the Stata Journal
  • Quantifying change over time: Interpreting time-varying effects in duration analyses – published by Political Analysis
  • Bootstrap pointwise confidence intervals for covariate-adjusted survivor functions in the Cox model – published by the Stata Journal
  • Sticks and Carrots for Peace: The Effect of Manipulative Mediation Strategies on Post-Conflict Stability (with Iris Volg) – forthcoming in Research & Politics, [Open access journal version]

Disaggregating the relationship between mediation and conflict intensity

Conflict management attempts tend to be initiated when conflicts escalate. The project looks into this endogenous process of violence and conflict management and analyzes the relationship between the short-term dynamics of intrastate conflicts and third party mediation attempts. It ties together the literature on conflict management and disaggregated conflict research. On a larger scale, the project tests the central role of information asymmetries postulated by the bargaining theory of war. Using a combination of empirical work and computational modelling I am able to show that, first, short-term conflict events strongly predict the decisions to initiate and accept mediation onset. Second, these association undermine our ability to estimate mediation effects in existing country-year or conflict-level data. Third, once mediation is initiated and addresses the main conflict incompatibility, mediation is associated with a strong reduction in conflict intensity. Overall, the empirically observed pattern of conflict reduction is substantively similar to the theoretical prediction of the computational model.

Project papers:

  • Anticipating mediated talks: Predicting the timing of mediation with disaggregated conflict dynamics – published by the Journal of Peace Research
  • Impeding fatal violence through third party diplomacy: The effect of mediation on conflict intensity – published by the (Journal of Peace Research)
  • Simulating the unknown: Illuminating unobserved selection biases in temporally aggregated studies of mediation

Temporal dynamics of one-sided violence (2009-2012)

During my BA and MA studies, I worked as a research assistant with the Konstanz One-Sided Violence Event Data (KOSVED) Project and assisted with coding and data management. The project motivated both my bachelor's and master's thesis. The BA thesis examined the effect of various external interventions on the level of violence against civilians using an interrupted time series design. A related paper was eventually published (joint work with Gerald Schneider and Margit Bussmann). My master's thesis examined our ability to predict one-sided violence. The resulting paper demonstrates that both the number of acts and the intensity correlate with other conflict events and enable fairly accurate predictions.

Project papers:

  • The Dynamics of Mass Killings: Testing Time-Series Models of One-Sided Violence in Bosnia (with Gerald Schneider and Margit Bussmann) – published by International Interactions
  • Predicting atrocities. Statistically modeling violence against civilians during civil war – NEPS Working Paper

KONTAKT

Prof. Dr. Constantin Ruhe

Goethe University Frankfurt
Faculty of Social Sciences
Institute for Political Science

Campus Westend - PEG-building
Theodor-W.-Adorno-Platz 6
Room 3.G 113 (3rd floor)
60323 Frankfurt am Main

Tel: +49 (0)69 798-36580
ruhe@soz.uni-frankfurt.de

Administrative Assistant
Aline Hebenstreit
Room 3.G 160 (3rd floor)
Tel: +49 (0)69 798-36559
hebenstreit@soz.uni-frankfurt.de