Data on interventions during periods of political instability

Abstract

Interventions into civil conflicts have been the focus of considerable research in recent years, but one of the limitations to many studies has been the emphasis on interventions once a conflict begins. While important, we know that states and other actors often take action prior to the onset of a civil war in hopes of diffusing – or exacerbating – a potentially volatile situation. To date, however, no one has been able to study these pre-conflict interventions because appropriate data did not exist. In this article we introduce a new dataset that fits this specific need. Our data identifies states that are at risk of civil war and codes instances of third-party military, economic, and diplomatic interventions. Based on forecasting models that derive risk scores for all states from 1957 to 2007, we are able to identify those states that are most at risk and provide detailed information about interventions that occur in those states. We include a brief empirical example that applies our new data on interventions to test for their effects on the likelihood of civil war or stability. Consistent with prior arguments regarding interventions during civil wars, we show that military interventions increase the risk of civil war onset, while economic and diplomatic interventions forestall that particular outcome. The limited example highlights just one of the potential uses for our new data. With it at hand, researchers will now have the ability to answer many of the vexing problems surrounding the processes that may or may not lead to civil war.