Moises Arce (Tulane University) and Takeshi Wada (The University of Tokyo), the team leaders behind this project, overlapped academically at the University of Missouri in the late 2000s. They soon realized that they were both researching similar topics, but in different countries. They put together a grant proposal to compile and quantify protest event data for Latin America, but that research effort was not successful.

 

Several years later they reunited at the University of Tokyo, and there they envisioned a collaborative project with colleagues who have also put together protest event datasets in other Latin American countries. This group of researchers gradually grew larger at academic gatherings hosted by the University of Tokyo and Tulane University, as well as workshop meetings at several LASA meetings.

 

This collaborative project seeks to highlight the contributions of protest event analysis and country-specific events datasets to furthering our understanding protest politics in the Latin American region.