Project Description
The Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) project is a research project that is collecting systematic data on contentious issues in world politics. More detail on the project's goals and theoretical underpinnings may be found in the papers generated by the project.
Project Participants
The ICOW project was started in 1997 by Paul R. Hensel, then at the Political Science department at Florida State University and now at the University of North Texas. Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, then also at Florida State University and now at the University of Iowa, joined the project several years later as co-director.
Beyond Paul and Sara, a number of other researchers have worked on ICOW data sets. Some served as research assistant for a single semester or for a few summer research hours, while others -- most notably Allison, Brochmann, Sowers, and Tures -- have spent substantial amounts of time working for the project over several years (listed here in alphabetical order):
- Territorial Claims: Mike Allison, Cherie Bryant, Glynn Ellis, Taylor Fravel, Bryan Frederick, Kim Genger, Ed Hally, Danny Hill, Baris Ornarli, Shawn Rowan, Jackie Rubin, Bill Reed, Steve Shellman, Cliff Sherrill, Tom Sowers, Ashly Townsen, and John Tures
- Maritime Claims: Mike Allison, Michael Benton, Tristan Brown, Karl Burhop, Brian Donnelly, Naeda Elliot, Christina Fattore, Jake Freiburger, Ed Hally, Paul Haufe, Garrett Hilpipre, Jared Hurvitz, Neal Johnson, Ahmed Khanani, Derrick Kraus, David Lucas, Kate McNulty, Mark Nieman, Nick Rushek, Mustafa Samiwala, Kristin Stewart, Matthew Stinson, Clayton Thyne, Eashaan Vajpeyi, Tom Wallace, and Christopher Wille
- River Claims: Patrick Armshaw, Anna Batta, Jeremy Backstrom, Marit Brochmann, Glynn Ellis, Jen Kruse, Sunhee Park, Tom Sowers, Emily Stull, and Everett Young
- Regime Claims: John Tures has done all of the work on this data set by himself.
Project Funding
Funding for the territorial claims data (in the form of research assistants) has generally been provided by the political science departments at Florida State, Iowa, and North Texas. Paul Hensel received a small Summer 1999 grant from FSU'S Committee on Faculty Research Support (COFRS) to cover initial research on river claims. He and Sara Mitchell have received National Science Foundation (NSF) grants in 2001, 2002-2004, and 2010-2013 to cover data collection on territorial, river, and maritime claims. He also received a relatively small 2008 grant from the Northeast Asian History Foundation for work exploring general trends in the relationship between colonial legacies and territorial claims.
The Project's Name
J. David Singer of the University of Michigan was kind enough to allow the use of the name "Correlates of War" in the ICOW project's name when the project first began in the late 1990s. It should be noted that Singer, the Correlates of War project, and the University of Michigan, Penn State University, and University of Illinois (all of which have hosted COW at some point in time) bear no responsibility for any decisions or errors that might be made by the ICOW project; such responsibility lies entirely with Paul Hensel, Sara Mitchell, and their co-authors and research assistants associated with the ICOW project.
Endorsement of Specific Claims
The project's co-directors wish to emphasize that neither the ICOW project nor its participants take or endorse any official positions with respect to any of the claims in our data set. We are attempting to identify cases where nation-states have disagreed over specific issues in the modern era, as well as measuring what made those issues valuable to them and studying how they chose to manage or settle those issues. We have no interest in promoting or supporting any specific position on any of these claims, and we instruct our research assistants to make sure that any personal opinions they might have do not affect their research or coding.
It is also important to emphasize that the ICOW project's research and coding of individual cases is not influenced in any way by the views or opinions of any funding agencies or other organizations or institutions. Most of the research assistants who have worked on the project over the years have been paid for by the departments where the project's co-directors have been employed, which have no political agenda with respect to any of the cases in the ICOW data, but we have also received several external grants to assist in data collection. In no case have the sources of those grants made any effort to dictate how we should code any of the cases in our data set, or for that matter whether certain cases should or should not even be included in the data. Furthermore, even if a funding agency were to seek to influence our coding decisions, we would not comply; our purpose here is to provide an impartial compilation of data on territorial, river, and maritime claims, not to support any country's views on any specific claim(s).
Issue Data Sets
Data Set Requirements
Because one of the ICOW project's primary goals is the generation of systematic data on a variety of different types of issues dividing nation-states, the project will eventually produce numerous data sets that are fully compatible with each other. That is, each ICOW data set will follow the same format, contain the same type of variables, and contain data on contention over comparable types of issues.
(1) The first (and most important) requirement for each ICOW data set is explicit evidence of contention involving official representatives of two or more nation-states over some type of issue. In the case of the ICOW territorial claims data, this means evidence that official representatives of at least one state make explicit statements claiming sovereignty over a piece of territory that is claimed or administered by another state. Claims that are not made explicitly, are not made by official representatives of at least one state government, or do not involve at least one nation-state on each side of the claim are beyond the scope of the present data set.
(2) Second, each ICOW data set must be collectable without reference to the occurrence of militarized conflict over the issue in question. Most existing social science data sets that involve disputed issues begin by identifying cases of militarized conflict (disputes, crises, or wars) and then code the issues involved in each confrontation. One of the most important contributions of the ICOW project, though, lies in the ability to test propositions on the propensity of different issue types to lead to militarized conflict, which can not be done if the data collection only includes issues that actually lead to such conflict. The ICOW territorial claims data set thus includes all identifiable cases where two or more states are involved in a claim over territory -- regardless of whether or not this claim eventually led to militarized conflict (or any other type of interaction).
(3) A third requirement for each ICOW data set is that data must be collectable on some type of measure of issue salience. That is, scholars using the data set must have some way to distinguish between claims of higher and lower salience. The ICOW territorial claims data set offers numerous variables that may be used to distinguish claims by issue salience, including the area and population of the claimed territory, the existence of resource, ethnic, or religious bases for the claim, and whether the claim involves mainland or offshore territory, homeland or colony/possession territory, and all of the target state, part of the target state, or merely the precise location of the border.
(4) Finally, each issue covered by the ICOW project must be amenable to data collection on attempts to manage the issue(s) in question. Another important contribution of the ICOW data is the ability to test propositions on the ways that states attempt to manage or settle their disagreements over different types of issues. For the ICOW territorial claims data, this includes all attempts to settle a territorial claim through bilateral negotiations or through third party assistance (such as mediation, arbitration, or adjudication).
Current Data Sets
The ICOW project is currently involved in collecting data on four types of issues: territorial, river, maritime, and regime claims. Each of these data sets is addressed in a separate page on this web site:
- Territorial Claims: explicit contention between two or more nation-states claiming sovereignty over a specific piece of territory. Official government representatives (i.e., individuals who are authorized to make or state foreign policy positions for their governments) must make explicit statements claiming sovereignty over the same territory.
- River Claims: explicit contention between two or more nation-states over the use or abuse of a specific river (or river system). Official government representatives (i.e., individuals who are authorized to make or state foreign policy positions for their governments) must make explicit statements contesting the usage of that river, typically involving concerns of water quality (e.g. pollution), water quantity (e.g. dams or diversion of water for irrigation), or navigation along the river.
- Maritime Claims: explicit contention between two or more nation-states over the use of a specific maritime zone. Official government representatives (i.e., individuals who are authorized to make or state foreign policy positions for their governments) must make explicit statements contesting the usage of that maritime zone, typically for matters like fishing or navigation.
- Regime Claims: explicit statements by one or more states seeking to remove the specific leader or entire political system of at least one other state.
Possible Future Data Sets
Data on the initial issue data sets -- territorial, river, and maritime claims -- will be released publicly (through this web page) as it is completed (with a new version usually released whenever one or more of the three data sets has been extended by the completion of another geographic region of data coverage). Upon completion of these initial three issues, the project may move on to collecting additional data sets involving different types of contentious issues between nation-states, as well as trying to keep the initial data sets updated.
The most likely direction for future work would involve the collection of data on (ethnic, linguistic, religious, or other) identity-based claims, where the subject of the claim is a disagreement over the status or treatment of the identity group. Examples of such issues include Austrian demands over Italy's treatment of ethnic Germans in South Tyrol since World War II (which continued long after Austria stopped trying to recover the territory itself) or Russia's demands over the treatment of ethnic Russians in the post-Soviet successor states. Most issues of this type do not seem to involve demands for territorial sovereignty over the area where the identity group lives, so this would be largely distinct from the current territorial claims data set.
Another potentially useful direction for future work would involve collection of data on similar types of claims (territorial, river, and/or maritime) between different political units within a single nation-state, such as U.S. states; this would allow a comparison of how the management of (say) territorial issues is different when there is a Leviathan above the claimants, as opposed to international anarchy above nation-states.
It must be emphasized that these are only ideas for possible future work, though. We make no guarantee that we will collect data on these or any other issues beyond the first three.
Supplementary Data Sets
Beyond the issues data sets described above, the ICOW Project has also collected several supplementary data sets to help in subsequent data collection and analysis. While not directly involving issues, these data sets are important for testing various issue-related hypotheses, as well as for collecting data using historical reference sources.
- Colonial History: past colonial or other dependency relationships for each state. This includes other states or empires that have ruled each state as a colony, protectorate, League of Nations mandate, UN trust territory, or other type of dependency, as well as states that have seceded from existing states and states that have merged into existing states.
- Historical State Names: alternative names (or alternative spellings of names) for each nation-state in the COW interstate system. This is most useful for researchers working with historical sources, which often refer to states by different names than we use today.
- Multilateral Treaties of Pacific Settlement: membership in multilateral treaties/institutions with at least five member states that explicitly call for the pacific settlement of disputes among their members, and/or that explicitly recognize and protect the territorial integrity of their members.
http://www.paulhensel.org/icow.html
Last updated: 15 May 2012
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