Masanori Kikuchi, a PhD in Political Science student, has received the 2024 Best Visualization Award from the Journal of Peace Research. The work was featured in an article ("How does war affect cultural tolerance? Evidence from concert programs, 1900–60") by Kikuchi published online by the journal in January 2023 and featured in their March 2024 issue.
The voting committee – consisting of Anita Gohdes (Hertie School), Nils W Metternich (University College London), and Yuri Zhukov (Georgetown University) – found that "the use of excellent visualizations throughout the article demonstrates the state of the art in our discipline, and therefore, Masanori Kikuchi is a deserving winner of this year's JPR Best Visualization Award."
The study featured in Kikuchi's article "analyzes concert programs from 10 major symphony orchestras across five countries between 1900 and 1960, revealing that wartime significantly reduces performances of enemy nations' modern music, with post-defeat recovery differing between victorious and defeated nations." You can read the abstract below, the full article on the journal's website, as well as more about the award and previous winners.
Abstract:
How does war affect states’ tolerance toward foreign culture? It is well documented by historians that democratic countries, despite their heralded values of liberty and diversity, acquiesce and even promote the practice of cultural intolerance in wartime. The available evidence, however, remains either anecdotal or limited to a specific context, and the extent to which war-induced cultural intolerance persists has so far rarely been examined. In order to investigate the short- and long-term effects of war on the degree of foreign cultural acceptance, this article focuses on patterns of classical music performances before, during, and after the two World Wars, based on a novel dataset assembled from concert program notes of ten renowned symphony orchestras from five countries (Austria, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) between 1900 and 1960, covering 29,135 concerts and 125,530 pieces. Quantitative analysis suggests that the rate of performing pieces originating from belligerent countries in wartime declines markedly for music written in relatively modern times and that the defeat in wars led to a swift recovery of the exclusionary tendency against former enemy music. These findings demonstrate that states’ security concerns and relative power, rather than political regime types, dictate international transaction patterns, including cultural flows across sovereign state borders.
