Collaborative Research: Contentious Issues in World Politics: Updating the ICOW Dataset

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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.