State Membership in the International System
This data set expands the list of states identified by the Correlates of War. One critique of the Correlates of War list of members of the interstate system is that it is extremely Eurocentric because it requires that polities prior to 1920 be recognized by both Britain and France via the establishment of formal diplomatic missions. I revised the recognition criterion to include polities that had concluded treaties of alliance, commerce, or navigation with Britain and/or France. I conducted extensive archival research in Britain and France to identify these treaties and to verify that each polity added to the list met the Correlates of War population criterion. This revision adds a number of polities to the Correlates of War list of states, and backdates the entry dates for many others. I used this revised list of states to analyze which states disappear from the map of the world in my 2007 book, State Death. These revisions are also discussed briefly in this review of the Correlates of War list of the members of the international system.
Interstate War Initiation and Termination (I-WIT)
Narratives on each war are available via the Qualitative Data Repository. I-WIT is a collaborative project with Page Fortna and has been funded in part by the National Science Foundation. The final version of the dataset will be made available once both co-PIs have completed and published data analysis
Civil War Initiation and Termination (C-WIT)
This data set is currently under construction. Like I-WIT (see above), C-WIT adds many variables to the civil wars identified by the Correlates of War from 1816-2007. These variables include specific information about the parties involved in the conflict, their war aims, military strategy, internal structure, use of terrorism, and war termination. One of the aims of C-WIT is to correct the post-1945 bias in the quantitative civil war literature. To date, each war in C-WIT has been coded by one person, and a randomly selected draw of half the wars has been coded by a second person. We are in the process of reconciling these codings. C-WIT is a collaborative project with Page Fortna, and has been funded by the Carnegie Corporation and by the National Science Foundation.