Summer 2023 Fellow: Sophia Vahanvaty ’24
Office Description
The International Crisis Group is an independent organisation working to prevent wars and shape policies that will build a more peaceful world. Crisis Group sounds the alarm to prevent deadly conflict. We build support for the good governance and inclusive politics that enable societies to flourish. We engage directly with a range of conflict actors to seek and share information, and to encourage intelligent action for peace. Our work is urgently needed as the world is confronted with both new and chronic existing conflicts, each of which has devastating humanitarian, social and economic costs. Efforts to resolve conflicts are complicated by the profound shift in geopolitics, as well as the increasing prominence of non-state actors ranging from religious militants to criminal gangs.
Potential Projects
The International Crisis Group’s Future of Conflict Program is looking for a quantitative research voluntary intern to assist its analysts and fellows in their research activities. This is a desk-based position. The voluntary internship is an excellent opportunity for someone to learn about conflict analysis and advocacy work but also to gain valuable experience in a high-profile international NGO. Responsibilities include:
- Prepares data for research (pre-analysis)
- Helps design, implement and evaluate research, and automates research insights (post-analysis), the latter would help build internal data capacities
- The candidate would be able to write their own summaries of research, perform literature reviews, and retrieve information from the web
- In terms of data construction, cleaning, and analysis, little supervision is expected
- The candidate will work closely with FoC researchers, other teams within the organization (comms and research), and external partners
- Previous experience working on climate security, infrastructure, or regional focus on the Mekong or Horn is a plus.
Desired Skills
- Background in economics, computer science, statistics, social sciences, geography, environmental and earth studies, natural sciences or any other discipline using econometrics and data management.
- Fluency with statistics and econometrics
- (Advanced) coding skills in Stata, R, Python, or similar
- Strong writing and research skills
- Geospatial data skills, preferably in R or Python, but knowledge of ArcGIS/QGIS also helpful.
- Knowledge of how to deal with high resolution data, and data manipulation, especially raster data analysis
- Data management skills (i.e. how to manage a large amount of data)
- Data visualization experience is an advantage, but not a must
- Experience in retrieving information from the web to build a dataset using automated tools is a plus; Interest in pursuing (or gaining exposure to) research related to conflict and public policy
- Based in New York or remote.
