Research & Analysis Reports

Breaking down North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) output in English, we find a clear bifurcation in the pattern of language used when it comes to the discussion of texts related to the topic of nuclear weapons.

The field of election forecasting has become immensely popular in recent years, becoming so ubiquitous that some studies have argued election forecasts themselves can influence voters' perceptions and behavior in elections. While there is some criticism that election forecasting can contribute to a...

What OEF teams have helped experts learn about countering piracy in the last decade.

By the time 20 Indian soldiers had died and a still-unknown number of Chinese soldiers faced casualties after a high-altitude melee in the normally obscure Galwan Valley on June 15, India and China were already well into a border crisis. The events of June 15 simply had the effect of sharply raising...

This article tries to give a general idea of the technological level of North Korean nuclear weapon’s miniaturization in a bid to better understand the nuclear threat North Korea poses to the region and the globe. Through examining limited open-source materials the author tries to establish a rough ...

Throughout the month of June, North Korea has shown increased hostility toward South Korea. Some of these efforts include re-installing loudspeakers along the Demilitarised Zone at one point before removing them, blowing up a joint liaison office in its territory and announcing plans for a massive a...

While North Korea gets most of the attention when it comes to the subject of missile proliferation on the Korean Peninsula, South Korea too has a substantial missile program. The public received a rare glimpse into South Korea’s missile programs in May, when South Korean news outlets reported on a t...

New OEF/Alliance for Peacebuilding Report Provides Recommendations for implementing the Global Fragility Act

Today’s violent conflicts are much more complex and protracted, and traditional development assistance and diplomacy have not kept pace. The status quo is not working. The challenges facing peacebuilding at this moment are significant, complex, and interconnected. They require new ways of working to...

This report examines how co-management approaches to natural resource management affect the strength and durability of peace agreements following civil wars.

Natural language processing and topic modeling specifically have proliferated in accessibility over the past decade. Topic modeling algorithms such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) are now considered a type of "work-horse" tool for uncovering patterns (topics) in large sets of text data.

Increased availability and lower cost of satellite imagery has made it accessible to civil society in recent years. While universities, think tanks, and nongovernmental organizations are racing ahead to incorporate this form of open source intelligence (OSINT) into their regular research work, there...

On April 22, Iran placed a small satellite in orbit. The space launch was notable for two reasons. First, the launch was conducted by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC), not Iran's civilian space program. Second, the rocket used a new solid-propellant second stage (the Salman), which th...

A new fact sheet on leveraging artificial intelligence to enable enterprise lending in fragile and conflict-affected states like Somalia.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, competing international security priorities including arms control, nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, are taking a back seat. The delayed response to COVID-19 suggests some troubling analogies to the current state of affairs in the nuclear arena.