Xenophobic behavior includes a variety of offensive practices against foreigners. The recent increase in attacks against refugees in EU countries reveals how widespread this phenomenon has become across Europe. According to experts, brutal expressions of anti-foreign violence appear when the state fails to provide security and the potential actors enjoy a climate of impunity [1]. Anti-foreigner attacks constitute a main category of xenophobic violent events that entail specific types and sub-types. In DeMoLiSH, we build on previous classifications of anti-foreign attacks [2], following a coding schema [3] that covers a wide spectrum of event types related to xenophobia along with their structural components. In this context, the coding unit of the analysis is the event. The proposed event taxonomy includes a major event category Physical Attacks, encompassing various event types like Violent Attack, Sexual Assault, Attack Against Life, Attack Against Personal Property, and Attack Against Religious Property. In the schema, an event comprises a tuple containing information about its structural components (e.g., ACTOR for the entity that performs each event instance, TARGET for the entity to which the action is directed, LOCATION and TIME of the event).
References
[1] Muchiri, G. R. (2016). Xenophobia: a critical study of the phenomenon and pragmatic solutions for South Afrika (PhD Thesis). University of Pretoria, South Africa.
[2] Galariotis, I., Georgiadou, V., Kafe, A. and Lialiouti, Z. (2017). Xenophobic manifestations, otherness and violence in Greece 1996-2016: Evidence from an event analysis of Media collections. Working Paper. Florence: European University Institute. Available at http://hdl.handle.net/1814/46565
[3] Papanikolaou, K. et al. (2016). “‘Just the facts’ with PALOMAR: detecting protest events in media outlets and Twitter”. In Proceedings of the Tenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media.