The paper "Dissecting global air traffic data to discern different types and trends of transnational mobility", co-authored with Lorenzo Gabrielli, Ettore Recchi, Frabrizio Natale, and Michele Vespe and published in EPJ Data Science, won the American Sociological Assocation's Global and Transnational Sociology Best Paper Prize for an International Scholar this year. The paper is available open access.

Computational Conflict Research, a book co-edited with Jan Lorenz, Luis G. Nardin, Davide Natalini and Adalbert F.X. Wilhelm was just published in the series "Computational Social Sciences" at Springer Nature. It brings together a set of original studies that investigate conflict at various geographic scales and degrees of intensity and violence. Methodologically, it covers a variety of computational approaches from text mining and machine learning to agent-based modelling and social network analysis. Most of the contributions to the book resulted from research started at the first BIGSSS Computational Social Science Summer School that we organized at Jacobs University Bremen in 2018. The book is open acess and can be downloaded for free. 

A new article, "Mobility Hub or Hollow? Cross-border Travelling in the Mediterranean, 1995-2016" was just published in Global Networks. The paper, co-authored with Ettore Recchi (Sciences Po/EUI) and Federica Bicchi (LSE/EUI) is based on joint work in the Global Mobilities Project at the EUI's Migration Policy Centre. We show that moblity in the Mediterranean is distributed extremely unequally. Mobility is much higher and increasing more strongly along the northern than along the southern shore, thus creating a growing mobility divide (see figure on the left). South‐north and north‐south movements are even scarcer and stagnate or even decline over time. Mobility between France, Spain and Italy constitutes almost 57 percent of all mobility in the Mediterranean althouth these three countries account for little more than one percent of all country pairs in the region.

Community detection algorithms reconfirm that mobility predominantly takes place in disparate clusters around the Mediterranean, not across it. These findings imply that much like the Rio Grande in the U.S., the Mediterranean still constitutes a dividing obstacle to mobility in the 21st century. Multivariate regression models for network data suggest that geographical distance and, to a lesser extent, political visa regulations, explain the unequal mobility structure better than differences in economic well‐being.

The paper is open access and can be read in full here.

The article "A Trump Effect on the EU's Popularity? The U.S. Presidential Election as a Natural Experiment", published at Perspectives on Politics and co-authored with Lara Minkus and Jan Delhey, received this year's BIGSSS Best Co-Authored Paper Award from the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences. The laudation was given by Professor Heiko Pleines. BIGSSS writes that the committee was "especially impressed with the societal relevance" and the "analytical clarity, explanatory value and empirical foundation" of the paper. The award is endowed with 500 Euros.