Both policymakers and scholars care greatly about coercive military bargaining between states and between leaders, but no large-scale data resource exists to adequately test theories. This project addresses a critical shortcoming by collecting, coding, and analyzing all instances in which one state threatened, displayed, or used military force against another state, from 1816 to 2001. Currently, almost all data presents summary measures of combatant interactions. This existing data includes the overall start and end dates of hostilities, how many military troops died, and what the highest level of military action was during the conflict. However, we do not know what happened during the conflict. There is no data on the evolution of conflict within militarized disputes, when exactly fatalities occurred, or the individual actions that were taken by each combatant. The project will create new, incident-level data that will be combined with additional variables measuring whether actions were reciprocated, the location of each incident, and the number of civilian fatalities, generating precise conflict data over a long temporal span.
The intellectual merit of the project is associated with its advancement of theoretical insights in the study of conflict. Existing summary data of international disputes provides only indirect measures of what actually happened during these conflicts and, hence, an inappropriate sample for tests of theories. By increasing the level of data precision, the project will allow scholars to accurately assess the effects of deterrence in conflict, the likelihood of escalation during conflict, and many of the questions related to how and when states use military force to bargain. The data are likely to change the nature of empirical testing in international relations studies.
The broader impacts are connected to the project's importance for policymakers, as well as training opportunities. What causes international conflict is of course a central concern of policymakers and scholars, and this project would provide the opportunity to study the causes of conflict at a level of precision that has never before been realized over such a large time period. Thus, this work and the data from it are likely to have a broad impact on policy, scholarship, and society. The project also integrates numerous undergraduates and graduate students into the process of discovery and understanding. Almost 30 undergraduate students over the past two years have been involved in research related to this project, and the grant will accelerate their development tremendously. These students have started considering graduate education and research careers at a much higher rate than their peers, and many of these students have benefited from attending academic conferences. The majority of these undergraduate researchers have been from groups that are traditionally underrepresented in political science and several are first-generation college students whose primary exposure to science and discovery will be this research.
