Methods Meet Policy: Transnational Monitoring of the Israel–Palestine Conflict

For the past 2 years, the Kansas Event Data System project has been using event data and other web-based sources to produce quarterly reports on the Israel–Palestine conflict for the swisspeace (Swiss Peace Foundation) FAST Project, which is sponsored by Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and a number of non-governmental organizations. This paper describes the indicators that we are monitoring, the process we have developed to generate the reports, and the supplemental sources we are using. We address the issue of the differences between newspaper and news wire reports with respect to "media fatigue" effects and also analyze some of the strengths and weaknesses of this approach to conflict monitoring.