Preventing Violence Lab

Collaboratively building evidence on what works

— and how we would know

Safe communities

We are developing evidence on how to reduce crime and create safer communities in partnership with governments and police agencies.

Violent extremism

We are studying how to prepare communities and members of violent extremist groups to live together peacefully after demobilization.

Ethical research

We are collecting evidence on how research in conflict-affected areas affects participants, and building tools for reducing risks and harms.

Our approach

Deep partnerships

We work with governments, police, civil society, and international agencies. Partnerships begin before programming, so we can understand our partner's needs and ensure the evidence we develop will inform their decisions.

Credible evidence

We use credible methods to provide right-fit evidence. To describe policy problems, we conduct focus groups and representative surveys. To study impact and assess how to make programs and policies more effective, we design randomized experiments.

Ethical, inclusive research

We work with local researchers to identify research questions, develop instruments, and implement surveys. We are leaders in developing tools and evidence about how to protect the safety, mental health, and privacy of participants and our teams.

What we've learned

Recent evidence developed by the lab

Trusted authorities can change minds and shift norms during conflict

We worked with Mercy Corps and two leading religious figures to learn about how to encourage communities to accept returning members of the violent extremist group Boko Haram. We developed, recorded, and tested radio messages about forgiveness, which shifted willingness to accept former associates of Boko Haram by 10 percentage points.

Read policy brief Read scientific article

Community policing does not build citizen trust in police or reduce crime

We led a six-country evaluation of community policing, to find out whether the widely-adopted policy affects cooperation with police and reduces crime. Working with the police, we developed locally-appropriate increases in community policing practices. In all six sites, we found that the policy did not live up to its promise and did not reduce crime or build trust.

Read policy brief Read scientific article

Ethical, cost-effective, and credible impact evaluations

We develop tools for designing impact evaluations and using the evidence that results

Research planning tools

We built tools for planning impact evaluations, while balancing scientific goals, ethical tradeoffs, and logistical constraints.

Asking sensitive questions

We created tools and an evidence-based framework for navigating ethical and scientific tradeoffs in asking about sensitive subjects.

Accumulating evidence

We conduct systematic reviews and meta-analyses to inform our partners' decisions and conduct multi-site studies to speed up learning.

Research team

Graeme Blair
Faculty Director

Blair is Associate Professor of Political Science at UCLA and Co-Director of Trainings and Methods at the researcher-practitioner organization Evidence in Governance and Politics. He has been conducting research on preventing violence in Nigeria since 2009. His work is published in outlets including Science, PNAS, Journal of the American Statistical Association, and Foreign Policy.

Elayne Stecher
Research Fellow

Stecher is a joint Ph.D./M.A. candidate in political science and statistics at UCLA. She holds an M.A. in international relations from the University of Chicago. She has lived in Jordan and Nicaragua and has conducted research in Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Nigeria, and Iraq.

Mohammed Bukar
Research Advisor

Bukar leads Mobukar Research Consultancy, which is the premier survey research organization in Borno State, Nigeria and conducted the earliest social science surveys since the recapture of Maiduguri from Boko Haram.

Our partners

We worked with the international humanitarian organization Mercy Corps on an evaluation of radio programs to change social norms and behaviors about accepting returning members of Boko Haram.

We have been working with the Managing Exits from Conflict project to collect the first systematic survey data on demobilized former members of Boko Haram transiting through UN-supported facilities.

Our faculty director co-leads EGAP's efforts to increase inclusion of researchers and M&E teams, especially in Africa and Latin America — and to build accessible impact evaluation tools.

Funders

We are grateful for generous funding of our efforts.