Local conflicts around migration

Building on the preceding project “Conflicts over Societal Inclusion,” this project examined local conflicts and protest dynamics related to migration in 12 medium-sized cities and established a local protest database in which events were systematically recorded.
A second objective of the project was the further development of automated evaluation methods to enable the efficient analysis of large datasets in the future, as well as comparative assessments between cities and over time. Finally, the data were made accessible to a broader public through an interactive data visualization tool. This way, the project created a transparent and systematic foundation for analyzing local protest dynamics in the context of migration in Germany.

There has been no systematic recording of migration-related protests at the local level in Germany, nor methodological approaches for the automated identification of such events. This project addressed these research gaps to enable, in the long term, a spatially and temporally scalable analysis of local protest dynamics.

• Comparative analysis of local migration-related protests across 12 medium-sized cities over time and space.
• Methodological innovation through the development of automated evaluation methods for the efficiently scalable analysis of large datasets.
• Visualization of protest data via a publicly accessible interactive tool for research and the general public.

In the project, local protest was examined using protest event analyses. Based on systematically coded media reports, protest events were comparatively recorded and quantitatively analyzed. To explain regional variance, the data were linked with regional contextual information and applied to medium-sized cities in diverse political and socio-economic contexts between 2014 and 2018. The manually coded data also served as training material for automated analysis methods based on language models, enabling the method to be applied to larger datasets and longer time periods.

• The analysis reveals a common pattern with an increase in migration-related protests in 2015/16, followed by a significant decline, while developments vary between cities. Migration issues play a larger role in local protests in East German cities.
• Automated methods based on language models identify protests nearly as accurately as manual coding but still require optimization in annotating specific protest characteristics.