Christoph Trinn
Christoph Trinn
Christoph Trinn studied history and philosophy in London and Political Science, Comparative Religion, Public Law, and English Linguistics in Heidelberg and Bologna. From 2008 to 2013 he worked as a Lecturer at the Institute of Political Science of Heidelberg University. He has been working on his dissertation at the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences since 2011. Christoph Trinn holds a scholarship from the Research Training Group on Policy Performance of Autocratic and Democratic Regimes. His research interests lie in the fields of quantitative conflict research, systems theory, complexity science, and political violence in Asia and Oceania. He has been a long-term executive member of the Heidelberg Institute of International Conflict Research and is a member of the board of the CONIAS research group. An extended version of his CV along with a list of publications can be found here.
Dissertation
In recent years a finding from the 1940s by the co-founder of quantitative conflict research, Lewis Fry Richardson, was reintroduced into the debate by scholars of complexity science, namely the observation that the intensity of interstate conflicts follows a power law. Structures which produce such distributions of events, also known as scale-invariant, are self-organizing and complex. In this case there is no proportional relation between cause and effect, explanatory factors and conflict intensities, and very small as well as very large events are to be expected. This finding has important theoretical consequences with regard to the predictability of the intensity of political conflicts.
Apart from interstate conflicts, it has also been confirmed that the size of terrorist attacks obeys a power law. In the context of the dissertation project with the working title “Conflict and Complexity. Stress, Resilience, and Violent Conflicts in Political Systems,” this empirical observation is set on a broader conceptual basis. On the one hand, intrastate violent conflicts far below the level of war are included in the analysis, and on the other, the operationalization of the intensity of violent conflicts so far largely focusing on the number of battle-related fatalities is complemented by other quantitative as well as qualitative indicators.
In addition to this, the dissertation develops an empirically tested causal model of the structures and dynamics leading to an escalation of intrastate conflicts in a way that the resulting conflict intensities in their entirety follow a power law. Based on the observation that the present state of empirical conflict research is highly fragmented, this model aims at an increased synthesis of different explanatory approaches.
The model therefore centers on the physics and information theory concept of entropy, which is a measure of uncertainty, of contingency in a system and for unorderedness, randomness as well as uniformity of distribution. This is contrasted by the concept of negentropy which represents information and resources enabling order and maintaining structure.
Open systems, and social systems are a part of this category, are metabolic, i.e. they maintain or increase their order by importing negative entropy from their environment. Is a system’s metabolism in some way deficient, however, the resulting accumulation of entropy means stress for the respective system. In which manner a system reacts to this stress depends on its resilience, i.e. on its capacity to efficiently manage available negentropy resources. In the case of the political system this includes control capabilities vis-à-vis the other subsystems of the society. If this governance fails, systems under stress will rely on other, less efficient forms of resource management. In the case of political systems, these forms of stress reduction include political conflicts.
Advisor: Prof. Dr. Aurel Croissant
Selected Publications
„Der Heidelberger Ansatz der Konfliktdatenerfassung“, in: Zeitschrift für Friedens- und Konfliktforschung 2(1), 2013 (mit Nicolas Schwank und Thomas Wencker).
“Democratic and semi-democratic conflict management in Southeast Asia”, in: Schwarzmantel, John / Kraetzschmar, Hendrik (Hrsg.): Democracy and Violence. Global Debates and Local Challenges, Abingdon (Oxon) and New York (NY): Routledge, 2012, S. 185-214 (with Aurel Croissant).
“Democratic Conflict Management Capabilities in Southeast Asia”, in: Croissant, Aurel / Bünte, Marco (Hrsg.): The Crisis of Democratic Governance in Southeast Asia, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, S. 209-229.
„Kulturkonflikte in inner- und zwischenstaatlicher Perspektive“, in: Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehung-en, 17(1), 2010, S. 5-37 (mit Uwe Wagschal, Aurel Croissant, Thomas Metz und Nicolas Schwank).
„Muster und Entwicklungstrends politischer Konflikte im Spiegel des Conflict Information System (CONIS) Heidelberg“, in: Feichtinger, Walter / Dengg, Anton (Hrsg.): Kein Feind in Sicht. Konfliktbilder und Bedrohungen der Zukunft, Wien: Böhlau, 2010, S. 65-87 (mit Nicolas Schwank).
„Mediative versus bewaffnete Konfliktinterventionen. Die Friedensmissionen IPKF und SLMM in Sri Lanka“, in: Buciak, Sebastian / Dehn, Rüdiger von (Hrsg.): Indien und Pakistan. Atommächte im Spannungsfeld regionaler und globaler Veränderungen, Berlin: Köster, 2010, S. 345-373 (mit Pascal Sadaune).
„Kulturelle Konflikte seit 1945. Die kulturellen Dimensionen des globalen Konfliktgeschehens“, Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2009, 296 S. (mit Aurel Croissant, Uwe Wagschal und Nicolas Schwank).
„Asymmetrien in Sri Lanka. Die strukturelle Ratio politischer Konflikte“, in: Buciak, Sebastian (Hrsg.): Asymmetrische Konflikte im Spiegel der Zeit, Berlin: Köster, 2008, S. 490-511 (mit Pascal Sadaune).
