Abstract
Thomas Zeitzoff at New York University has been awarded the annual Bruce Russett Award for the Article of the Year published in Journal of Conflict Resolution during 2011. The winning article, “Using Social Media to Measure Conflict Dynamics: An Application to the 2008–2009 Gaza Conflict” was published in the December 2011 issue (JCR 55, 6: 938-69).
Members of the editorial board of JCR participated in a two-stage process in order to determine the winner of the award. The first step was for a nominating committee to recommend their top four articles for consideration. In the second step, the four articles that received the most nominations were given to a voting committee who were asked to rank order each of the articles. The winner received the highest overall rankings among all the votes cast. In casting their votes for the article of the year, the committee was asked to judge the strength of each article in terms of new and important contributions to basic research based on considerations of theoretical quality, methodological rigor, and substantive relevance to the field of conflict studies.
In the award-winning article, Zeitzoff presents an innovate empirical study of the military interactions between Israeli and Hamas armed forces during the 2008–2009 Gaza conflict in which reports from Twitter and other social media are drawn upon to create a unique data set of hourly conflict data. With this highly disaggregated data set, Zeitzoff is able to conduct a sophisticated analysis of the micro-dynamics of military conflict. One of the many interesting findings is that while Israeli forces moderated their attacks following a key UN Security Council vote, Hamas armed forces increased their attacks. The editor of JCR would like to extend a special thanks to all of those board members who served on the nominating and voting committees: Christian Davenport, Todd Sandler, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Gerald Schneider, Rose McDermott, and Sarah Soule.
The award is USD 500.