Kristine Eck (Uppsala University) discusses the challenges of working with contemporary and historical police archives. For quantitative social scientists, how does "the data generation process" introduce measurement bias into the processes that we are actually describing when we employ data generated by the state for counterinsurgency? How do ongoing state efforts to digitize archives aid and hinder political scientists and data scientists trying to quantify human rights abuses? What are the citation norms for private correspondence by public figures who were in command decision roles during episodes of violence? A frank, eye-opening discussion on how scholars access and use state-generated datasets on repression, with comparative cases ranging from the Malayan Emergency to Israel and from contemporary OECD countries to Nepal.
