Hrag Balian
Affiliation
- Graduate Student Fellow, Department of Sociology
Research
My leading research interests are in the fields of human violence and aggression, social network theory and method, analytical history, and computational and statistical modeling. My dissertation research focusses on identifying the historical drivers of large-scale violence. In this regard, I pay attention to the continuity of violence -- the fact that acts of violence are embedded in other past acts of violence. Viewing violent acts as a form of communication between militarized groups, i.e. interaction, I have developed as part of my research a technique that extracts sequences from acts of violence to ascertain underlying interactional opportunities observed by historical actors at historical moments. I suggest that such available opportunities can be pursued by actors, and it is within these spaces that acts of violence become meaningful and the historical drivers of violence located. My research -- both the techniques developed and used and the more specific results that are found -- provides new insights to old problems both within and outside my areas of interest. My planned and ongoing research on organized violence occurs -- as it does for my dissertation -- at the intersections of my areas of interest.
