A Guide to Intra-state Wars

An Examination of Civil, Regional, and Intercommunal Wars, 1816-2014

Jeffrey S. Dixon, Meredith Reid Sarkees

• Publisher: CQ Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780872897755
• eBook ISBN: 9781506317984
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Sourcing data and analyses from the rigorous Correlates of War Project, A Guide to Intra-state Wars describes how civil war is defined and categorized and presents data and descriptions for nearly 300 civil wars waged from 1816 to 2014. Analyzing trends over time and regions, this work is the definitive source for understanding the phenomenon of civil war, bringing together an explanation of the theoretical premises driving the Correlates of War Project, along with revisions to categories of, and actors in, civil wars that have been made over the years, and data from the Nations, States and Entities civil war dataset.

Features:

• Provides detailed case studies of nearly 300 civil wars from 1816 to 2014
• Combines the systematic study of war with analyses of trends over time and regions
• Includes discussion of the different types of actors in international relations and presents data from the Nations, States, and Entities dataset
• Considers data describing non-state participants (rebels) in civil wars  

Chapter One The Correlates of War Project

A History of the Correlates of War Project

This kind of research may help to liberate all who are, in one way or another, prisoners of war…. If we pick our research questions with courage, address them with imagination and rigor, and write them up with clarity and forthrightness, those of us in the world politics and peace research community may just make that modest difference between human survival and thermonuclear Armageddon.

—J. David Singer¹

The Correlates of War Project (COW), which continues as the longest-running research program in the study of international relations, was launched by J. David Singer in 1963.² Singer had been introduced to behavioral methodology during a postdoctoral program at Harvard University, and while in Cambridge he met Karl Deutsch, who would become an influential voice in the COW project. Subsequently Singer moved to the University of Michigan in 1958 to teach in a temporary capacity in the political science department and to work with the Center (and Journal) for Research on Conflict Resolution, headed by Kenneth Boulding and Robert Angell. Though Singer had reservations about the term peace research because of its predominantly psychological focus, he considered the center to be “near irresistible in both normative and epistemological terms,” and he remained involved with the center until its dissolution.³ Singer’s association with the center contributed to the ending of his contract with the political science department, and he subsequently accepted a position at the Naval War College for 1960. Luckily, prior to his departure from Ann Arbor, Singer had given a talk at the Mental Health Research Institute (MHRI), which was at that time working on an integrated theory of human behavior. Though dominated by biological and neurological scientists, MHRI wanted to include social scientists as well and thus offered Singer a full-time research position that would begin upon his return. He also continued his work with the Center for Research on Conflict Resolution, and when the center received its first major outside funding from the Carnegie Corporation, Singer applied for, and received in 1963, a grant for a two-year pilot study titled “The Correlates of War.” Singer conceived of the COW Project as a continuation of the endeavor to systematically and scientifically describe and understand war begun by Quincy Wright and Lewis Fry Richardson.⁴ COW also was anchored securely in the dictum of peace research that “war, to be abolished, must be understood. To be understood, it must be studied.”⁵ Singer’s commitment to the behavioral science approach also was fueled by overt policy goals as well. He felt that both the study and practice of world politics had “suffered too long under the influence of those who offered sweeping generalizations on the basis of a few selected cases, presenting ‘theories’ without a trace of reproducible evidence, and proposed policies that rested on meager speculation or the conventional wisdom of a particular and provincial time and place.”⁶ Thus, Singer hoped that the scientific approach to the study of war would enable him to make a difference in the policy realm as well.⁷

The 1963 grant enabled Singer to bring other researchers to the COW project, and his first goal was to recruit an open-minded historian as a research assistant. He soon hired Melvin Small, who was at the time a graduate student in American diplomatic history at Michigan, as the project’s historian. Singer and Small then began to chart the steps for a scientific study of war. Singer decided that the first task of the project would be to define operationally the key variables. A goal was to improve upon the earlier data-gathering projects through the consistency, accuracy, and reproducibility of its data. The approach they adopted was a combination of deductive and inductive reasoning. Identifying the key variables was initially deductive: some variables were selected based on their importance in existing theories of world politics as a goal of the project was to compare some of the widely accepted theoretical notions about war (especially those of realism or realpolitik) to the historical evidence.⁸ Other variables emerged inductively from the historical records themselves. Thus Singer described the project’s overall approach: “The project is far from atheoretical, but it certainly has proceeded without the framework of a fully articulated formal model.”⁹ From 1963 to 1964, Singer continued planning the initial phases of the COW project while accepting a Fulbright Scholarship in Oslo, where he assisted in establishing the Peace Research Institute. Meanwhile in Ann Arbor, Small threw himself into the task of identifying and devising coding rules for the key variables, which he hoped came as close as possible to historical reality. He and two assistants began gathering information for two data sets: international wars and diplomatic recognition.

Singer returned to Michigan in the fall of 1964 with half-time positions at the political science department and MHRI. This period was what Singer referred to as the “golden age” of the world politics program at Michigan, lasting until the late 1970s, which brought a number of talented graduate students into the program and to working with COW.¹⁰ A second grant from the Carnegie Corporation (1965– 1967) enabled the project to hire five part-time assistants and to significantly expand its data-gathering operations. Singer’s work within MHRI was instrumental in the framing of the COW Project: MHRI had been created to try to build a unified system of explanation of human behavior, and Singer’s adoption of the systems approach influenced the early trajectory of COW. Singer and Small conceived of wars taking place within a global structure of five nested systems: the global system, the international system, the interstate system, the central system, and the major power system.¹¹ The primary war participants were the geopolitical entities with the capabilities, status, and willingness to engage in interactions among the members of the interstate system, referred to as “states.” Singer and Small saw this distinctive period of interactions as emerging after the Congress of Vienna, when the end of the Napoleonic wars marked what they saw as a clear transition to the modern state system.¹² Thus they utilized 1816 as the project’s base year from which data on wars would be gathered. Initially dividing this temporal domain into two periods, 1816–1919 and 1920–1965, would also provide a time frame that was long enough to measure some of the significant changes in the structure of the system.¹³ Utilizing the diplomatic recognition data as one of the key markers of system membership, Singer and Small identified the population of states within their temporal domain, which was published in 1966 as “The Composition and Status Ordering of the International System 1815–1940.”¹⁴ Subsequently, Singer, Small, and Bruce Russett expanded this list to include other entities that either had not qualified for interstate system membership or were part of the broader international system in the twentieth century.¹⁵ Thus much of COW’s early work focused on system-level analyses and only later shifted to substate levels.

With the potential war participants now identified, Singer and Small developed a general typology of wars that was based on the experiences confronting the members of the interstate system. Their three basic types of war were: (1) inter-state (or intra-systemic) wars that were between or among states or members of the interstate system; (2) extra-state (initially referred to as extra-systemic) wars that were between a state and a non-state entities outside the state’s borders; and (3) civil wars that involved conflicts between the national government and another group within a state. In explaining wars, three central variables that were derived from the realpolitik paradigm were the capabilities, commitments, and contiguities of states.¹⁶ The primary outcome variable was of course war and more specifically the frequency, severity, and magnitude of international war across the system. The severity of a war was measured in terms of battle-connected deaths, and here Singer and Small adopted procedures that differed from earlier compilations in that they excluded civilian fatalities.¹⁷ They also established a threshold of 1,000 combatant deaths to differentiate war from other forms of less-severe conflict.¹⁸ Gathering fatality statistics was one of Small’s great frustrations with his work with COW. For most wars there are no accurate battle death statistics; such fatality numbers—or even hints at such numbers—are scattered throughout disparate sources. Small noted that “military historians are frequently satisfied when they can describe a battle as bloody or can assert that casualties ran in the thousands.”¹⁹ Yet such information was not sufficient for COW purposes, forcing Small and Singer to devote significant effort, examining multiple sources to produce guesstimates and rounded fatality numbers. Small was specifically troubled by the ways in which people used this data. He felt that many scholars unaffiliated with the project were so driven by the desire for “ready-made cheap data” to test a model that they “cared little about the true meaning of the numbers they were using.”²⁰

With these preliminary stages complete, Singer and Small were able to focus on the primary task of COW, identifying all of the international wars that occurred after 1816. They also developed a data set concerning the alliance behavior between and among system members.²¹ In 1968, David Singer edited a volume, Quantitative International Politics, which included both discussions of the quantitative method and some of the early statistical findings.²² Singer and Small’s contribution to the book was their article, “Alliance Aggregation and the Onset of War, 1815–1945,” which utilized the war and alliance da...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustration List
• Table List
• Illustration List
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Preface
• About the Authors
• Introduction
• Chapter One The Correlates of War Project
• Chapter Two The Study of Intra-state War
• Chapter Three Intra-state Wars in North America
• Chapter Four Intra-state Wars in South America
• Chapter Five Intra-state Wars in Europe
• Chapter Six Intra-state Wars in the Middle East and North Africa
• Chapter Seven Intra-state Wars in Asia and Oceania
• Chapter Eight Intra-state Wars in Sub-Saharan Africa
• Appendix List of All Intra-state Wars in Chronological Order
• References
• Index