Destabilizing events such as those captured by SPEED's Societal Stability Protocol (SSP) - protests, politically motivated attacks, disruptive state acts, mass movements of people, irregular transfers of political power - do not happen in a vacuum. Rather, most are rooted in something. Developing the capacity to identify the origins destabilizing events can potentially lead to important advances in our understanding of civil unrest. It can also broaden the utility of event data and greatly enhance their explanatory potential.

Destabilizing events - whether they are political expression events, politically motivated attacks, disruptive state acts, or some other manifestation of discontent - can vary enormously in their intensity. It is important to capture differences in intensity because they can affect the impact of seemingly similar events or the reactions of others to those events.

This document is designed to provide operators of the EXTRACT suite of programs with an accessible guide to the definition and meaning of events intended to be captured in the Societal Stability Protocol (SSP) with the Social, Political and Economic Event Database (SPEED) project.

This whitepaper offers a brief introduction to the BIN system of the Social, Political and Economic Event Database (SPEED) project. BIN provides automatic document categorization of highly nuanced topics across massive-scale document archives. The BIN system allows a group of trained human editors to present the computer with a relatively small collection of hand-categorized documents representing a given topic.

Creating a valid and reliable body of event data requires meeting a number of challenges (clearly defining the events to be studied, developing reliable sources of information on those events, identifying source documents with relevant information, etc.). The fact that most event data projects, including SPEED, use news reports as the source of information on events generates an additional set of challenges.

SPEED is a technology-intensive effort to collect a comprehensive body of global event data for the Post WWII era. It is a protocol-driven system that was designed to provide insights into key behavioral patterns and relationships that are valid across countries and over time. SPEED's Societal Stability Protocol has been the focus of most developmental work at this stage in SPEED's development.

This document provides an introduction to, and an overview of, the SPEED Project's Societal Stability Protocol (SSP).  The SSP's aim is to generate event data that will advance our understanding of civil unrest in the post-WWII era.  The SSP's focus is on human-initiated destabilizing events, which are defined as happenings that unsettle the routines and expectations of citizens, cause them to be fearful, and raise their anxiety about the future.  The SSP's destabilizing event ontology contains four Tier 1 categories (political expression events, politic

Coup d'états are important events in the life of a country. They constitute an important subset of irregular transfers of political power that can have important and enduring consequences for a country’s well-being. This notwithstanding, a comprehensive and well-documented inventory of coups has yet to be compiled. The Coup D’état Project (CDP) is an effort to fill that void. It is a two-stage project and the second stage is still in progress.