The ICOW Identity Claims Data Set
The identity claims data set follows the general guidelines on the ICOW home page.
An identity claim is defined as explicit contention between two or more nation-states over the status of an ethnic group that is located in both states. More specifically, official government representatives of the challenger state (i.e., individuals who are authorized to make or state foreign policy positions for their government) must make explicit claims or demands regarding the treatment or status of their ethnic kin in the target state.
Please note that the ICOW Project and its directors do not take or endorse official positions on any identity claims. Our goal is 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. Inclusion/exclusion of specific cases, and coding of details related to those cases, follows strict guidelines presented in the project's coding manuals (which are available below).
Measuring Claim Salience
Much like territorial, river, and maritime claims, the salience of identity claims is measured by a 0-12 index, which includes up to six points each for the claim's challenger and target states (one point each for six indicators of salience). The salience of a claim is based on the relationship between the shared ethnic group that is the subject of the claim and each of the two claimant countries:
- Homeland/Dependent Territory: is the territory where the group lives considered to be homeland territory, rather than as a colonial or dependent possession?
- Historical Sovereignty: has the state exercised sovereignty over the members of this group within the past two centuries?
- Ethnic Similarity: ethnic similarity between the group and the state's population (0.5 if 10%+ of population, 1.0 if 50%+)
- Linguistic Similarity: linguistic similarity between the group and the state's population (0.5 if 10%+ of population, 1.0 if 50%+)
- Religious Similarity: religious similarity between the group and the state's population (0.5 if 10%+ of population, 1.0 if 50%+)
- Spatial Distribution of Group: challenger=is group concentrated regionally? / target=is group distributed statewide?
Project Participants
- Principal Investigators:
- Paul R. Hensel, University of North Texas
- Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, University of Iowa
- Krista E. Wiegand, University of Tennessee
- Andrew P. Owsiak, University of Georgia
- Research Assistants: Kyle Allen, Douglas Atkinson, Erik Beuck, Meagan Burt, Christopher Eubanks, Conny Kazungu, Roman Krastev, Chris Macaulay, Ray Ou Yang, Kayla Parnin, Cody Schmidt, Tiffany Wang, George Williford, Meredith Winn
Current Status
Data collection and coding remains underway. More details and summary statistics will be provided here once the data set is complete.
Beginning in 2019, we have started publishing quarterly reviews of events occurring in any of the four current ICOW issue types -- territorial, river, maritime, or identity claims -- during three-month periods. These reviews describe such events as the beginning of new claims, the occurrence of military or other provocations related to the issue, and attempts to manage or settle the issues peacefully. Besides posting each quarterly review at the above link, we also offer a DuckDuckGo custom search that allows users to search for reviews that contain such terms as names of territories, countries, or leaders. (For now, this is limited to ICOW's quarterly reviews of news over territorial, river, maritime, or identity claims, covering events since the beginning of 2019. In the future, we plan to expand this search to include access to summary web pages for each of the more than 1200 claims identified by the ICOW project, which will be created as part of the next external grant that the ICOW project receives.)
Data Set References
The following article was the first to discuss the identity claims data set, although the data set was not yet completed:
- Paul R. Hensel and Sara McLaughlin Mitchell (2017). "From Territorial Claims to Identity Claims: The Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) Project." Conflict Management and Peace Science 34, 2 (March): 126-140.
We have presented a number of papers using project data, which will soon be listed here:
- (coming soon)
Download the Coding Manuals and Data
All ICOW data sets may be downloaded freely, but we request several professional courtesies from users:
- (1) Please do not redistribute ICOW data to other scholars. Instead, every user should be directed to this web site to download the latest officially released version of the data, which may be more up-to-date. (It would also be desirable for current users of ICOW data to check this web site occasionally to see if newer versions of the data have been released.)
- (2) As you are using the data, if you notice any potential errors or missing cases, please report them to the ICOW project, so that we can investigate and correct the error if appropriate.
- (3) Please email us a copy of any of your research. We are always interested in seeing what other scholars are doing with the data.
Coding Manuals
The following links provide access to the coding manuals and other useful information:
- Identity Claims coding manual (in PDF format; the coding rules and instructions that were used by ICOW researchers as they collected and coded the identity claims data)
- General ICOW coding manual (in PDF format; general coding rules and instructions for ICOW researchers working on the territorial, river, or maritime claims data sets - not yet updated to reflect the identity claims data set)
- ICOW non-state actor list (in PDF format; a list of actor codes for non-state actors that were involved in ICOW claims, usually as third parties trying to help manage or settle the claims)
Data
- (the data will be available here upon completion)
Please note that this, like all ICOW data sets, uses the list of country codes in the COW interstate system. Please see that list for help in identifying which countries were involved in the events included in this data set, or for any questions about when each country was considered a sovereign, recognized state.
Contact Information
The ICOW Identity Claims data set is collected by a four-university team, and is maintained by Paul Hensel at the University of North Texas. Please contact him with any questions about the data set:
http://www.paulhensel.org/icowiden.html
Last updated: 17 November 2019
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