Research Design in Politics and International Relations

Anouk S. Rigterink is Associate Professor in Quantitative Comparative Politics, at Durham University, UK. Anouk has also taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses in research methods at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Oxford. Anouk has published widely on violent conflict, terrorism, and natural resources. This includes work on mining and conflict, on community monitoring of forest resources, on drone strikes as a counterterrorism policy and on behavioural mechanisms in conflict and post-conflict. Many of these publications would not have existed without productive and rewarding co-authorship with Mareike Schomerus. Anouk has published in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution and Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, among others. Formerly, she was Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University and International Crisis Group, the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics and Political Science. She holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Mareike Schomerus is VP at Busara, a research institute headquartered in Kenya, and a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, where she teaches different research methods. Mareike has published widely on violent conflict, international development and conflict-resolution, evidence-based policy, and behavioural mechanisms in post-conflict recovery. Many of these publications are co-authored with Anouk S. Rigterink in a fruitful inter-epistemological collaboration spanning close to two decades. Mareike co-edited volumes (on African secessionism and South Sudan’s borderlands (Palgrave Macmillan) and authored The Lord’s Resistance Army: Violence and Peacemaking in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict (Bloomsbury, 2023, open access here). She was formerly Director of Programme Politics and Governance and Research Director of the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium at ODI. Before becoming a social scientist, Mareike worked as a journalist. Mareike holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science as well as advanced degrees from Columbia University, the University of Bremen, and Smith College.

• Chapter 1: Introduction: Let’s find out what this is all aboutChapter 2: The rewards of a research mindsetChapter 3: The research processChapter 4: How do you know? Your epistemologyChapter 5: Formulating a research question and contributing to the literatureChapter 6: Theories and conceptsChapter 7: On the case: Cases, case selection and case studiesChapter 8: Knowledge hierarchies: Why you see things the way you doChapter 9: The ethics of researchChapter 10: Testing causes: Quasi-experiments to study polarisationChapter 11: Systematically together: Covariation to study votingChapter 12: How does one thing lead to another? Process tracing to study social movements and protestsChapter 13: Compiling knowledge: Systematic reviews to study climate and the environmentChapter 14: Researching customs, practices and expressions: Using ethnography to study identityChapter 15: Experiences, feelings and perceptions: Phenomenology to study inequalityChapter 16: Text as action: Discourse analysis to study war and violent conflictChapter 17: Data collection with human participants: Who, how and whyChapter 18: Data collection without human participantsChapter 19: Qualitative data analysisChapter 20: Quantitative data analysisChapter 21: The final page — only to go back to the beginning

The approach is original, the figure help clarify complex theorethical approaches and the boxes are useful and provide clear insights into up-to-date case studies. One of the most innovative that I have recently come across. Required reading.