Firewatch Project

***Cline Center Report on Societal Instability Events by Federal Actors in Chicagoland***

Designed for monitoring contentious political processes around the United States, the Cline Center’s Firewatch Project captures both civil unrest events like protests, demonstrations, and acts of political violence as well as governmental responses to those events along with a range of other destabilizing acts initiated by governmental entities such as rule of law violations. This system is currently being developed for rapid deployment and scalability with the goal of becoming a nearly real-time national reporting system. 

 

Documenting Societal Instability Events

The Cline Center for Advanced Social Research at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has nearly two decades of experience in building and deploying hybrid systems that combine computational technologies with highly trained human analysts to rapidly document civil unrest events and destabilizing governmental acts around the world. Over the past six years the Cline Center team has been developing its next-generation Firewatch event data system for documenting societal unrest events and destabilizing governmental acts that are mentioned in news reports and other credible information channels. 

Firewatch authoritatively documents three primary types of societal instability events:

• Political Expression Events: The public articulation by non-governmental actors of threatening or unwelcome political statements directed towards societal elites and/or governmental actors, including both symbolic acts and mass political actions.

• Political Violence Events: Physical acts perpetrated by non-governmental actors for political reasons that are intended to damage the person or property of others, including attacks, riots, kidnappings, assassinations, suicide attacks, and armed actors seizing locations.

• Destabilizing Governmental Acts: Acts of government or governmental tasks executed or ordered by government actors in their official capacity—including the failure to perform routine duties—that have potential to produce societal instability, including 11 subtype categories of extraordinary destabilizing acts and 18 subtype categories of ordinary destabilizing acts.

Firewatch Methods and Capabilities

The Cline Center’s Firewatch system uses Natural Language Processing algorithms in combination with highly trained human analysts to reliably extract information about societal unrest events from news reports and other authoritative sources of information. Leveraging the Cline Center’s extensive news monitoring capabilities, the Firewatch project transforms news descriptions of contentious incidents into structured data about specific events that occur in specific places on specific days. Firewatch event datasets can be displayed in website dashboards that allow users to see the geographic and longitudinal development of complex conflict processes, visualized in charts and maps.

Firewatch is one of several research initiatives at the Cline Center that involves the study of civil conflict processes.  To learn more about the other projects, click here.