The committee consisting of Anita Gohdes (Hertie School), Nils W Metternich (University College London), and Yuri Zhukov (Georgetown University) has awarded the thirteenth JPR Best Visualization Award to Justin V Hastings (University of Sydney) and David Ubilava (University of Sydney).
The prize-winning publication is a research article titled 'Agricultural roots of social conflict in Southeast Asia' and was published in Journal of Peace Research 62(6): 1714-1732. The study analyzes the extent to which harvest-time-dependent shifts in employment and income affect political violence and social unrest. Using spatio-temporal monthly data from 2010 to 2023 across eight Southeast Asian countries, the authors find a relative increase in political violence and a decrease in social unrest in rice-producing croplands during the harvest season. The visualizations in this article are purposeful, well-proportioned, and consistently of a high standard, with attention to informative captions and effective use of readable labels, resulting in self-sufficient figures. All graphs follow a logical layout, which is maintained across figures (see Figure 4-7), which further contributes to a coherent and accessible presentation. A particularly compelling aspect of the visualizations in this article is the ability to present multidimensional data in a simple and intuitive manner. Figure 1 effectively presents spatial data by providing insights into variation in social conflict both within and across countries. This presentation is aided by the effective use of shading, non-overlapping visual elements, and a visually balanced placement of labels. Figure 3 similarly employs an appealing interplay of geographic features and labeling to illuminate the temporal dimension of spatial rice-harvest data. The committee finds that the excellent visualizations throughout the article exemplify the state of the art in the discipline. Justin V Hastings and David Ubilava are therefore deserving recipients of this year’s JPR Best Visualization Award.
All articles published in Volume 62 of the JPR were eligible for the award. The award is worth 500 USD.
