On January 23, 2026, political scientist Dr. Nathan Cook delivered a seminar and a workshop for graduate students and faculty of the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Integrative Conservation Research at the University of Georgia. Dr. Nathan Cook is an assistant professor at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, working on the intersections of public policy analysis, environmental policy, and international development. He focuses on environmental governance, conservation policy, and climate change adaptation in the Global South, employing methods such as econometric modeling, experimental and quasi-experimental design, and open-source data collection. The visit is part of a broader collaboration with UGA partners Dr. Don Nelson (Department of Anthropology) and Dr. Sechindra Vallury (Odum School of Ecology) on smallholder farmers’ adaptation to climate change in India.

In the morning, Dr. Cook provided an insightful overview of his research agenda on “militarized conservation” or “green militarization.” Green militarization is the use of military personnel, equipment, tactics, and surveillance technology to protect wildlife and natural resources, primarily to fight poaching. He draws from the political ecology literature, which has widely investigated the topic in specific contexts, usually in or around protected areas. Dr. Cook’s research quantifies these conflicts, expanding the regional scale of most studies to a global scale. For this, he draws on secondary data documented in an online and freely available database: ACLED (Armed Conflict Location & Event Data). ACLED provides concise information about millions of cases of armed violence and conflicts worldwide. As part of his analysis of these data, he classifies reported conflict events into different categories and clusters them according to their geographical region of occurrence.

After explaining the theoretical premises of his research, Dr. Cook gave a workshop in the afternoon in which participants had the opportunity to try his research methods. He provided a protocol he developed to transform qualitative information from online databases into quantitative data that can be analyzed using statistics. First, he provided an overview of different databases that provide relevant information for this type of research. For instance, he showed the EJ Atlas, a platform on environmental justice conflicts, and the WDPA, the World Database of Protected Areas, highlighting the types of data that each of them makes available as well as their strengths and weaknesses. For transforming qualitative data into quantitative variables, it is necessary to draw lines, which implies in sacrificing data richness in order to capture larger trends. After explaining in detail important methodological considerations of this approach, he gave participants the opportunity of trying the protocol. The exercise consisted of using the protocol to analyze reported conflict cases from an online database. At the end, he opened the floor for questions and concerns regarding the application of the method, as well as reflections about the workshop. Participants shared insights on the approach’s accessibility and its effectiveness for understanding the relationships between violence and conservation.