Jerusalem is characterised by a heightened level of territorial conflict. Rarely does a day go by without media reports of violent clashes between Orthodox Jews, secular Israelis, Palestinians and the Israeli police and security forces. Ethnic, religious and ideological tensions feature prominently in the social life of the city, and efforts to find a political solution to the city’s future status have thus far failed.
Graduate Institute Associate Professor of International Relations/Political Science Ravi Bhavnani, together with a team from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has recently completed a project that uses an evidence-driven computer simulation to better understand the sources and patterns of violence in urban areas, employing Jerusalem as a demonstration case.
Professor Bhavnani was the catalyst for the project. The project builds on a series of papers he and Dan Miodownik, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, had authored on violence in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. “The idea of analysing the logic of violence in Jerusalem came to us on a tour through the city conducted by Ir Amim,” says Bhavnani. Shortly thereafter, Bhavnani and Miodownik responded to a call for visiting scientists by Dirk Helbing, an ETH-Zurich professor of sociology, and spent a number of weeks in Zurich refining the core idea for the project.
The empirical data for the simulation was furnished and coded by the Israeli project team. The researchers assembled a geo-coded dataset on all deaths and injuries related to the political conflict from police reports, newspaper articles and reports by non-government organisations for the 2001-2009 period. The simulation, in turn, uses geo-coded data on the location, size, and shape of neighborhoods, as well as data on the general location of housing settlements. The population of each neighborhood is likewise based on empirical data and dynamically updated for each group using a natural rate of growth to reflect demographic trends.
Using the model, the team examines the distribution of violence under four proposed scenarios for the future status of Jerusalem: a “business-as-usual” scenario, a scenario based on the Clinton Parameters of 2000, a scenario that follows the outlines of a Palestinian proposal, and a scenario based on a return to the borders of 1967.
Read more on the ETH website.
Extracts from article by Peter Rüegg of ETH Zurich