UCF Research Guides: Conflict, War and Terrorism: Datasets

Correlates of War Series

Resort to War: A Data Guide to Inter-State, Extra-State, Intra-State, & Non-State Wars, 1816-2007 by Meredith Reid Sarkees & Frank Whelon Wayman
Call Number: General Collection -- JZ 6385.S27 2010
check for availability of print version
International Military Alliances, 1648-2008 by Douglas M. Gibler
Call Number: Reference -- KZ 5900.G53 2009

Index of Economic Freedom

Business Freedom
Trade Freedom
Fiscal Freedom
Freedom from Government
Monetary Freedom
Investment Freedom
Financial Freedom
Property Rights
Freedom from Corruption
Labor Freedom

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) -- Databases

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) This link opens in a new window
- Multilateral Peace Operations Database
- Military Expenditure Database
- Arms Transfers Database
- Arms Embargoes Database
- National Reports Database

Facts on International Relations & Security Trends (FIRST) "provides a federated system of databases on topics related to international relations and security, accessible through a single integrated user interface"
SIPRI Multilateral Peace Operations Database "offers information on all UN and non-UN peace operations conducted since 2000, including location, dates of deployment and operation, mandate, participating countries, number of personnel, costs and fatalities"
SIPRI Military Expenditure Database "gives consistent time series on the military spending of 172 countries since 1988, allowing comparison of countries' military spending: in local currency, at current prices; in US dollars, at constant prices and exchange rates; and as a share of GDP"
SIPRI Arms Transfers Database "shows all international transfers in seven categories of major conventional arms since 1950, the most comprehensive publicly available source of information on international arms transfers"
SIPRI Arms Embargoes Database "gives information on all arms embargoes that have been implemented by an international organisation, such as the EU or UN, or by a group of nations. All embargoes that are in force, or have been in force since 1998, are included"

Centre for the Study of Civil War (CSCW)

Centre for the Study of Civil War (CSCW) This link opens in a new window
at The International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO)
provides data on armed conflicts

Available data sets include:

Replication datasets for various published articles
Data on Armed Conflict - both internal & external (1946+)
- UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset
- Battle Deaths Data
- Conflict Site Data
- ACLED - Armed Conflict Location & Event Data
- Onset & Duration of Intrastate Conflict
- Religious Cleavages & Civil War
Data on Governance
- Polity IIId Project
- Polyarchy Dataset (1810-2000)
Geographical & Resource Datasets
- Petroleum Dataset
- Diamond Resources
- Shared Rivers (1816-1992)
- Shared River Basin Database
- Length of International Boundaries (1815+)
Economic & Socio-Demographic Data (1945-1994)

Demographic Data
Ethnic Composition Data

Computational Event Data System (CEDS) (formerly KEDS)

Computational Event Data System (CEDS) This link opens in a new window
"The Computational Event Data System uses automated coding of English-language news reports to generate political event data focusing on the Middle East, Balkans, and West Africa. These data are used in statistical early warning models to predict political change."
"The twenty-five-year project was originally based in the Department of Political Science at the University of Kansas where it was known as the Kansas Event Data System (KEDS) project, and then was moved to the Department of Political Science at Pennsylvania State University from January 2010 to June 2013, where we could never figure out an acronym that didn't sound like a skin disease. It is now hosted by Parus Analytical Systems."

Phoenix Near-Real-Time Event Data -- daily updates (June 2014+)
Cameo Event Data -- "CAMEO -- Conflict and Mediation Event Observations -- is the new coding scheme we have developed in conjunction with our current research on third-party mediation."
Levant Data Set -- "a compilation more than thirty years of WEIS (to 2005) and CAMEO coded data specifically targeting events relating to states within the Levant."
Political Instability Task Force Worldwide Atrocities Dataset -- "contains about 8,000 records based on reports in international news sources of killings of five or more non-combatants anywhere in the world from January 1995 to the present."
Modified WEIS Event Codes -- "Most of the codes that are used in the data sets produced by the KEDS project are the standard WEIS codes originally developed by Charles McClelland (see "World Event/Interaction Survey (WEIS) Project, 1966-1978", ICPSR Study No. 5211) However, at various points we have experimented with introducing new codes into WEIS..."
Turkey Data Set -- "covers Turkey for the period 3 January 1992 to 31 July 2006 using the CAMEO coding scheme."
Gulf Data Set -- "covers the states of the Gulf region and the Arabian peninsula for the period 15 April 1979 to 31 March 1999. "
Central Asia Data Set -- "contain WEIS-coded event data for an assortment of Central Asian states, including Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbijan, Kazakstan, Kyrgistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan for the period May 1989 to July 1999."
Balkans Data Set -- "contains WEIS-coded events for the major actors (including ethnic groups) involved in the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia from April 1989 through July 2003."
West Africa Data Set -- "contains WEIS-coded events for the major actors in West Africa from January 1989 through February 2002. The data was produced from full-story coding of Reuters articles. Most of the major opposition groups in the Liberian and Sierra leone civil wars are included in the data."
Levant & Balkans Mediation Data Sets -- "contains tab-delimited files for third-party 'mediation episodes' in the Levant (April 1979 - December 1998) and Balkans (June 1991 - May 1999). A mediation episode is defined as a specific mediator (e.g. USA or UN) meeting with both parties to a conflict within a period of a week; these are aggregated by month."
International Cooperation & Regional Conflicts Events Data -- "These data sets were generated for the purpose of investigating interactions in regional conflicts. The project has traced events in several regional conflicts (each listed separately)."

Other Datasets

See also:

Armed Conflict Location & Event Dataset (ACLED) This link opens in a new window
"designed for disaggregated conflict analysis and crisis mapping. This dataset codes the dates and locations of all reported political violence events in over 50 developing countries."
Center for International Development & Conflict Management (CIDCM) This link opens in a new window
"CIDCM data sets are available through each individual quantitative research project. The data is available at no cost, but may require on-line registration."
- International Crisis Behavior Project
Conflict & Peace Data Bank (COPDAB) (1948-1978) This link opens in a new window
"a longitudinal computer-based library of daily international and domestic events or interactions. The event records in this file describe the actions of approximately 135 countries in the world, both toward one another and within their domestic environments."
Correlates of War Project This link opens in a new window
Available data sets include:
- State System Membership (1816+)
- Inter-, Extra- and Intra-State War (1816-2007)
- Militarized Interstate Disputes (1816-2010)
- National Material Capabilities (1816-2012)
- World Religion Data (1945+)
- Formal Alliances (1816-2012)
- Territorial Change (1816-2018)
- Direct Contiguity (1816-2016)
- Colonial/Dependency Contiguity (1816-2016)
- Intergovernmental Organizations - status & membership (1815-2014)
- Diplomatic Exchange (1817-2005)
- Bilateral Trade (1870-2014)
- Defense Cooperation Agreement (1980-2011)

Data Sources for International Environmental Politics (IEP)
Dimensions of Democide, Power, Violence & Nations
Factor Analyses & Data on Nations
- Politics & Political Systems
- Collective Violence
- Democide
- Social Diversity
- Cultural & Socio-Economic Characteristics
- Human Security
- The Social Field
First Use of Violent Force (FUVF)
"The FUVF variables indicate which state(s) initiated violent force within a militarized interstate dispute (MID), which state was the target of that force, and the date of that violent force."

Global Terrorism Database (GTD) This link opens in a new window
"an open-source database including information on terrorist events around the world from 1970 through 2013 (with annual updates planned for the future). Unlike many other event databases, the GTD includes systematic data on domestic as well as international terrorist incidents that have occurred during this time period and now includes more than 104,000 cases."

International Conflict & Cooperation Data (Paul Hensel, University of North Texas)
provides links to various data sets regarding:
- Militarized Disputes, Crises, & Wars
- Interstate Rivalry
- Event Data
- Internal Conflict Data
- Other Conflict & Cooperation Data

International Criminal Tribunals Database This link opens in a new window
"the data and codebook used to analyze the decisions made by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the Special Court for Sierra Leone"
International Environmental Agreements (IEA) Database This link opens in a new window
"Lists of international environmental treaties, conventions, and other agreements with links to text, membership, performance data, secretariat, and summary statistics. Over 1100 multilaterals, 1500 bilaterals, and 250 "other". Grouped by Date, Subject, and "Lineage" of legally-related agreements (e.g., those related to the Montreal Protocol)."

Kristian Skrede Gleditsch Data Projects
- Archigos - A Data Base on Leaders, 1875-2004
- Gleditsch & Ward Minimum Distance Data
- Distance Between Capital Cities

Mapping Arms Data (MAD) This link opens in a new window
"features over 35 000 records of the exports and imports of small arms and ammunition from more than 262 states and territories between 1992 and 2011"
All Minorities at Risk Project (AMAR) This link opens in a new window
"AMAR builds on MAR but uses a new set of selection criteria that is free from the selection issues known to plague other data on ethnic groups. These selection criteria are based on the concept of "socially relevant" ethnic groups, rather than groups that are "at risk", to identify an expanded list of 1,202 ethnic groups, more than 900 of which were not in the original MAR dataset. Based on this list, the project created a new database – the AMAR Phase I data – which is more representative of the universe of socially relevant ethnic groups."
"Minorities at Risk (MAR) tracks 284 politically-active ethnic groups throughout the world from 1945 to 2006, identifying where they are, what they do, and what happens to them. MAR focuses specifically on ethnopolitical groups, defined as non-state communal groups that have "political significance" in the contemporary world because of their status and political actions." The MAR project's last update was completed in February 2009 for the years 2004-2006. Information and data from MAR is available at:
- https://cidcm.umd.edu/research/mar
- http://www.mar.umd.edu/
Norwegian Initiative on Small Arms Transfer (NISAT) This link opens in a new window
-Small Arms Trade Database -- "the world's only on-line global database of small arms transfers. It contains over one million records detailing transfers between some 250 states and territories over the period 1962-2011."
-Due to a lack of funding, the NISAT database isn't being maintained as of October 2017.

Opportunity to Use Force
See also the book "The Political Use of Military Force in U.S. Foreign Policy" by James David Meernik (Ashgate, 2004), available in the UCF Main Library, General Collection, 4th floor, UA 23.M437 2004. check availability

Penn World Table This link opens in a new window
"a database with information on relative levels of income, output, inputs and productivity, covering 182 countries between 1950 and 2017"
Polity5 Project: Political Regime Characteristics & Transitions, 1800-2013 This link opens in a new window
"continues the Polity research tradition of coding the authority characteristics of states in the world system for purposes of comparative, quantitative analysis"

PREDICT, the Protected Repository for the Defense of Infrastructure Against Cyber Threats
"a community of producers of security-relevant network operations data and researchers in networking and information security. The repository provides developers and evaluators with regularly updated network operations data relevant to cyber defense technology development."
"The Dataset Catalog is publicly accessible and you can browse dataset details without logging in."
Requests for user accounts should be processed through your academic department to agree to comply with the PREDICT Rules of Behavior

RAND Database of Worldwide Terrorism Incidents This link opens in a new window
"a compilation of data from 1968 through 2009"
Social Conflict in Africa Database (SCAD) This link opens in a new window
"includes protests, riots, strikes, inter-communal conflict, government violence against civilians, and other forms of social conflict not systematically tracked in other conflict datasets. SCAD currently includes information on over 7,900 social conflict events from 1990 to 2011."
produced by Climate Change & African Political Stability (CCAPS)
Terrorism Databases for Analysis (National Institute of Justice) This link opens in a new window
"databases that will help researchers analyze terrorist incidents around the globe and terrorism-related indictments in the U.S."
- Terrorist Indictments: The American Terrorism Study includes information on nearly 500 terrorists from about 60 terrorist groups indicted for more than 6,700 Federal criminal counts
- Inventory and Assessment of Databases Relevant for Social Science Research on Terrorism
- Pre-Incident Indicators of Terrorist Activities
- The Impact of Economic, Political, and Social Variables on the Incidence of World Terrorism
- Geospatial Analysis of Terrorist Activities: The Identification of Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Preparatory Behavior of International and Environmental Terrorists
- Building a Global Terrorism Database
- Terrorism in Time and Space: The Inclusion of Spatio-Temporal Data From Federal Terrorism Cases Into the ATS Database
United Nations General Assembly Voting Data (Erik Voeten, George Washington University) (1946+) This link opens in a new window
provides a unique identifier for each resolution, the date of the vote, codes for the types of votes, the UN resolution number, the vote-tally, short and long descriptions of the content of the votes, the actual votes by countries, and a hyperlink to the text of the resolution (where available).
WomanStats This link opens in a new window
"the most comprehensive compilation of information on the status of women in the world. The Project facilitates understanding the linkage between the situation of women and the security of nation-states. We comb the extant literature and conduct expert interviews to find qualitative and quantitative information on over 310 indicators of women's status in 174 countries. Our Database expands daily, and access to it is free of charge."
World Development Indicators (World Bank) (1960+) This link opens in a new window
"provides a comprehensive selection of economic, social and environmental indicators, drawing on data from the World Bank and more than 30 partner agencies. The database covers more than 900 indicators for 210 economies with data back to 1960."