Takeaway: Governments restrict digital rights through national law preemptively, outside the spotlight of political events.

For a quick overview of the study, check out the 1-pager below.

Leveraging original data on 360+ internet laws in 44 African states (2000–2022), I find that governments are more likely to pass restrictive internet regulation when such legislation is widespread regionally. Domestic or regional contention does not predict new restrictive regulation.

Not sure if this paper / R package is for you? Take a quick look at our 1-pager to find out more.

To address these challenges, we introduce a spatial approach for linking various types of war-related violence to civil wars recorded by the @ucdp.bsky.social —and it's easily executed with our R package ucdplink (github.com/corinnebara/...).

This also seems like a great occasion to share the one-pager we created to make our findings more accessible. How do you try to make your research more accessible? I’d be delighted to hear your insights!