Political Science—War and Peace
The study of war, peace, and violent political conflicts is not an area with considerable quantitative data. No UN office releases any large amount of such data, and although the U.S. Department of Defense publishes a great deal of quantitative information about its own operations, it maintains no central portal that brings all of that information together in one easily searchable place.1 Nevertheless, a few private organizations and research projects with an interest in war and peace have created some quite useful data sets.
Major Sources: World
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) produces five databases (www.sipri.org/databases) with both quantitative and qualitative information about war and peacekeeping. The more quantitative of these databases include the Multilateral Peace Operations Database, covering 2000 to present, which contains information such as name and location of the peacekeeping operation, date on which the operation began, names of the countries contributing personnel to the operation, number of various types of personnel (military troops, military observers, civilian police, and other civilian staff) authorized and actually sent, cost of the operation, and number of deaths both annually and overall. Its Military Expenditure Database records the amount of money and percentage of GDP that countries spent on their militaries since 1988, and its Arms Transfers Database contains extensive data on the international sale of weapons going back to 1950. It also hosts a cooperative database, Facts on International Relations and Security Trends (FIRST), which brings together qualitative and quantitative data from more than a dozen organizations with interests in human rights, peace, and democracy. In addition to data from SIPRI’s databases, other indicators available in the FIRST database include the Corruption Perception Index (from Transparency International), the Failed States Index (from the Fund for Peace), the Worldwide Press Freedom Index (from Reporters without Borders), and the Global Peace Index (from Vision of Humanity), among others.
Uppsala Conflict Data Program
The Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP, www.pcr.uu.se/research/UCDP/), another participant in the FIRST database, maintains several data sets on armed conflicts. These cover everything from formally declared wars between two governments, to undeclared wars between informal groups of nonstate actors (from ethnic or religious groups to drug cartels), to organized acts of military violence against civilians. In addition to basic information about each conflict—identities of the parties, dates the conflict started and ended—the data sets also contain estimates of the number of people killed in the conflicts. There are also separate data sets on external supporters of combatants in the conflicts. The various data sets cover different time periods, with the oldest going back to 1946.
Correlates of War
One of the best sources for quantitative data about historical conflicts is the Correlates of War project (www.correlatesofwar.org), through which political science faculty and graduate students at several different universities have been collecting standardized data about international conflicts, civil wars, and the factors that may contribute to them since 1963. Most of the data covers the period from 1816 (the end of the Napoleonic Wars) until a few years ago (the ending date varies by data set). Although the data contains many variables that are obviously and directly war related—such as the start and end dates of the conflict, who was fighting, who won and lost, and the number of fatalities—there are also country-level data sets on topics that may influence a country’s decision to join or to continue to fight a war. These include the percentage of the country’s population belonging to different religions, its membership in intergovernmental organizations, its production of iron and steel, the number of personnel in the armed forces, its military spending, and its military alliances. The data that is not specifically conflict related is reported for countries every year, whether or not they were involved in a war that year. The one drawback to this data is that it is released only as raw data sets, so it is unwieldy for a patron who just wants to know, for example, how much a single country was spending on its military in a given year.
Center for Systemic Peace
The Integrated Network for Societal Conflict Research (INSCR, www.systemicpeace.org/inscr/inscr.htm), a project of the Center for Systemic Peace, distributes data sets about various forms of political violence and about situations that may lead to political violence, such as states that are at risk of failing. Many of the data sets have relatively long time series; the data sets “Major Episodes of Political Violence” and “Coups d’Etat” go back to 1946, and several other data sets, including ones on refugees, genocides, and ethnic war, begin in the 1950s or 1960s. Data from INSCR is available only in Excel and SPSS formats.
Global Terrorism Database (University of Maryland)
The Global Terrorism Database (GTD, www.start.umd.edu/gtd/), hosted by the University of Maryland, contains data about terrorist attacks from 1970 until the present, with a lag of approximately two years. The data includes structured information about various aspects of each attack: group that perpetrated the attack, place of the attack (city, province, country, and region), date of the attack, type of attack (bombing, hijacking, assassination, etc.), target of the attack (private citizens, the military, the government, aviation, etc.), number of people killed and injured, whether hostages were taken, information about property damage from the attack, and more. The data can be accessed in two ways: users can search or browse by specific criteria, or the entire data set can be downloaded for analysis. The results of searching and browsing are presented both in tables and in charts and graphs. Tables with up to one thousand results can be downloaded without restriction, but a free registration is required to download the entire data set or large portions of it.
Empirical Studies of Conflict (Princeton University)
Another university-based project is Empirical Studies of Conflict (http://esoc.princeton.edu), which has detailed conflict-related data for the countries of Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, and Pakistan, and some data for the Philippines and Vietnam. This data includes information about violence of various types (terrorist attacks, military actions, etc.), drug production and anti-drug enforcement, as well as some survey and demographic data; note that not all types of data are available for all countries. Much of the data is georeferenced for use in GIS software, including the information about incidents of terrorism.
Terrorism and Preparedness Data Resource Center (Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research)
The Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan hosts the Terrorism and Preparedness Data Resource Center (www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/TPDRC/), which contains microdata about politically motivated crimes including domestic terrorism, international terrorism, and assassinations. The data sets are rich and varied, including topics such as public opinion about terrorism, steps that various institutions have taken to prepare for terrorist attacks, crime and safety in schools, and collective memories of terrorist attacks. However, a significant number of the data sets are available only to ICPSR subscribers, which can make the database frustrating to search for people not affiliated with ICPSR member institutions. Still, some potentially useful data sets are freely available.
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