Hi Lauren, This post was fantastic!!! An incredibly well researched and well written look at a really important topic. I think it is amazing to see things like this on the EA Forum and I am sure it will be useful to people. (For example, talking for myself, reading this and getting a better understanding of the scale of this issue makes it more likely that I will nudge Charity Entrepreneurship (where I work) to look into this area in future.)
In the sprit of trying to provide useful feedback, a suggestion and a question:
A suggested intervention
Police reform in LMICs, including better policing and more trust in police and in law courts. The idea here would be to reduce the number of incidents of violence and to improve the trusted mechanisms for dealing with those incidents to prevent violence escalating. I think there might be some work by the Copenhagen Consensus on what this might look like and the evidence base, and maybe some OpenPhil internal stuff on corruption prevention.
Question /​ research suggestion
It would be interesting to know which if any of the intervention you list you think would be most useful for preventing conflicts beyond civil wars. For example it would be interesting to get a sense of if there are interventions that might be good for both (neartermist) global development and (longtermist) preventing global catastrophic risks, or if the two topics are best treated wholly separately.
Policing reform is a topic near and dear to my heart, so I am happy to talk about this ad nauseam. One of the papers in my now-on-pause dissertation was on policing, and I also RAed on a study on community policing in the Global South. (It didn’t work.)
I agree that better policing is desperately needed in the developing world; functionally, there really aren’t police in much of the world. But I don’t know that the literature is yet mature enough for this kind of overview; policing in the developing world has really only taken off as a research area in the last few years. My wild speculation would be that police reform is really hard—changing incentives for police can be very difficult in under-resourced environments.
The field is really growing, though, so I’m excited to see what comes out of that field in the future. Travis Curtice and Rob Blair are two of my favorite scholars of policing.
Hi Lauren, This post was fantastic!!! An incredibly well researched and well written look at a really important topic. I think it is amazing to see things like this on the EA Forum and I am sure it will be useful to people. (For example, talking for myself, reading this and getting a better understanding of the scale of this issue makes it more likely that I will nudge Charity Entrepreneurship (where I work) to look into this area in future.)
In the sprit of trying to provide useful feedback, a suggestion and a question:
A suggested intervention
Police reform in LMICs, including better policing and more trust in police and in law courts.
The idea here would be to reduce the number of incidents of violence and to improve the trusted mechanisms for dealing with those incidents to prevent violence escalating. I think there might be some work by the Copenhagen Consensus on what this might look like and the evidence base, and maybe some OpenPhil internal stuff on corruption prevention.
Question /​ research suggestion
It would be interesting to know which if any of the intervention you list you think would be most useful for preventing conflicts beyond civil wars. For example it would be interesting to get a sense of if there are interventions that might be good for both (neartermist) global development and (longtermist) preventing global catastrophic risks, or if the two topics are best treated wholly separately.
Policing reform is a topic near and dear to my heart, so I am happy to talk about this ad nauseam. One of the papers in my now-on-pause dissertation was on policing, and I also RAed on a study on community policing in the Global South. (It didn’t work.)
I agree that better policing is desperately needed in the developing world; functionally, there really aren’t police in much of the world. But I don’t know that the literature is yet mature enough for this kind of overview; policing in the developing world has really only taken off as a research area in the last few years. My wild speculation would be that police reform is really hard—changing incentives for police can be very difficult in under-resourced environments.
The field is really growing, though, so I’m excited to see what comes out of that field in the future. Travis Curtice and Rob Blair are two of my favorite scholars of policing.