This project provides for additional data collection by the Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) project, a collaborative project co-directed by Paul R. Hensel (University of North Texas) and Sara McLaughlin Mitchell (University of Iowa). The ICOW project collects information on geopolitical conflicts between two or more countries involving disputed boundaries, including conflicts over land boundaries (or islands), maritime areas, and cross-border rivers. To date, the project has coded and made public information on over 450 issue conflicts since 1816 in North, Central, and South America, Western and Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. Some examples of hotly contested areas already studied by the project include the Falkland Islands, the Gulf of Fonseca, the Jordan river, and Alsace-Lorraine. Analysis of this data has already taught us a great deal about when countries are likely to resort to militarized means to resolve geopolitical issues, as well as when peaceful conflict management efforts are well positioned to succeed. The proposed project involves completion of data collection on border disputes (1816-2001), maritime disputes (1900-2001), and river disputes (1900-2001) for the remaining regions not currently covered by the ICOW project: Africa, Asia, and Oceania. The ICOW project records information on the importance of the claimed issue to each state involved, as well as all peaceful diplomatic and militarized attempts to resolve the contested issue. Peaceful attempts include bilateral talks between the disputants, as well as third party efforts to resolve the contested issue using mediation, arbitration, adjudication, etc. To date, the project has recorded information on 2005 peaceful and militarized attempts to settle issue claims in the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. When the project is complete, we will upload case chronologies to the website, which will make it easier for policy makers to access detailed information about each historical and ongoing boundary dispute.
Theoretically, this project expands our understanding of issues by using the new data to study the process by which new contentious issues arise, the process by which issues lead to long-term interstate rivalries, and the relative success of international institutions for managing and settling issues. First, the manner in which new conflicts emerge is examined. Some pairs of states, such as Honduras-Nicaragua and France-Germany, have had lots of different geopolitical issues arise throughout the course of their historical interactions, while other pairs of states avoid such conflicts altogether. One obvious predictor of these conflicts involves basic opportunities for them to occur, such as through shared land borders. Water-based disputes are also more likely to occur in areas where water is more scarce and in higher demand due to larger population and industrial needs. This project also focuses on countries? domestic institutions and participation in international organizations (such as the United Nations). Do democracies and international organization members have more similar foreign policy preferences and thus avoid geopolitical conflicts, or do they simply manage issues that arise more efficiently with peaceful tools? Initial analyses support the latter explanation, although additional data from Asia, Africa, and Oceania will ensure the generalizability of these results. Second, a new measure of rivalry based on geopolitical issues is developed. This includes pairs of countries with two or more ongoing issue conflicts or two or more militarized disputes over the same issue. These measures provide a clearer picture of the process of conflict management differs in issue rivalry and issue non-rivalry environments. Finally, the principal investigators extend their previous work on institutions and conflict management. Maritime issues, for example, can be managed by issue specific organizations like the Law of the Sea Convention (UNCLOS) or by more general organizations like the European Union and United Nations. They examine which types of organizations are best suited to helping states reach successful and long-lasting agreements. Beyond these new research topics, the newly expanded data will also allow scholars to improve previous research on factors such as colonial legacies by introducing information about issue conflicts in regions with richer colonial histories.
The goal of this project was to finish collection of data on every disagreement between countries over territory (1816-2001), international rivers (1900-2001), and maritime zones (1900-2001) in the modern era. This process included the collection of information on what makes each of these topics "salient" or valuable to the countries, as well as details about when the countries pursued their disagreements through the threat or use of armed conflict or through peaceful techniques like negotiations, mediation, or submission to an international court. In all, we have identified approximately 850 disagreements over territory, 150 over rivers, and 300 over maritime zones. These disagreements have led to over 1000 armed conflicts, as well as over 3000 peaceful settlement attempts. We have started analyzing the data ourselves, and have reached a number of important conclusions about these disagreements. First, armed conflict over these issues is both frequent and dangerous. These three types of disagreements account for roughly one-third of all of the armed conflicts between countries since 1816, and conflicts over these issues (particularly territory) are more likely to escalate to bloody levels than conflicts when the countries are fighting over something else. Armed conflict is more likely over territory than over river or maritime disagreements overall, but for each of the three issue types, conflict is more likely when the issue is regarded as more salient/valuable. On the other hand, peaceful negotiations are even more frequent than armed conflict for all three types of disagreements, and peaceful techniques like negotiation, mediation, or courts are much more likely than armed conflict to settle a disagreement. In particular, while international law and courts are often derided, submission of one of these issues to an international court or institution for a binding decision is much more effective than other techniques if the countries can agree to on an appropriate court (and the losing side almost always complies with the sourt's decision). Treaties can also be effective at preventing these types of disagreements from starting; river claims are less likely to begin where countries have previously signed at least one treaty governing relevant aspects of the river's usage, and maritime claims are less likely to begin between countries that have both ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Territorial claims have been found to have a very serious negative impact on relations between the claimants. After two countries' last claim has ended, they are much less likely to become involved in armed conflict even over non-territorial issues, and they are likely to see a substantial increase in the volume of trade with the former adversary. Not surprisingly, greater demands on scarce water resources seem to increase the risk of armed conflict over rivers somewhat, but these resulting conflicts rarely escalate to the point of fatalities, and peaceful negotiations are also much more likely where demands on scarce resources are greatest (consistent with a body of literature that treats rivers more as sources of cooperation than as sources of war). Beyond these findings, much remains to be done; some of our next research plans involve studying the impact of colonial legacies on border stability after former colonies become independent, the impact of the international norm of territorial integrity that is said to have developed over the course of the twentieth century, the impact of specific types of natural resources in claimed territories on the management of those claims, and the impact of ethnic ties between one or both claimants and the claimed territory. We have also made our data publicly available through our web site (www.icow.org). It has already been downloaded several thousand times, and has been used by other scholars in more than one hundred conference papers, journal articles, books, and dissertations. We expect that over time, other scholars will find many additional uses for this data that we had not anticipated, and will come up with many important lessons about the avoidance, management, or settlement of disagreements between countries.
