Douglas M. Gibler - International Conflicts, 1816-2010: Militarized Interstate Dispute Narratives

International Conflicts, 18162010

International Conflicts, 18162010

Militarized Interstate Dispute Narratives

Volume I

Douglas M. Gibler

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

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Copyright 2018 by Douglas M. Gibler

All rights reserved . No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

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ISBN 978-1-4422-7558-4 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-4422-7559-1 (electronic)

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Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to John A. Vasquez, the most inspiring scholar I have ever known.

Contents

Volume I

Volume II

First and foremost, I thank the many graduate and undergraduate students who have worked with me during the past nine years to generate the data and narratives provided here. There were many students, but two especially stand out. Steve Miller, now at Clemson University, and Erin Little, about to graduate from the University of Alabama in political science, both went far beyond anyones conception of what a good student should be. Steve collected much of the original data and wrote draft narratives of many of the most difficult-to-code disputes. Erin has worked tirelessly on finding and developing the particular incidents that took place within each conflict and, in turn, confirming the original coding of dispute cases. Our coauthored work in International Studies Quarterly also provided the underlying data for the codings described here.

As will be obvious from just the introductory chapter of this book, my work would have never been possible without the data produced by scholars associated with the Correlates of War Project (CoW) and J. David Singer at the University of Michigan. CoW literally invented the data that everyone uses to study international conflict. More than that, the scholars currently associated with the project have demonstrated unwavering dedication to keeping the MID dataset one of the best resources in International Relations. I would especially like to note, too, that Zeev Maoz, current director of the project, has always been a supporter of our efforts and of more and better data generally. Zeev even hosted a weekend conference in the spring 2015, which provided an opportunity for Glenn Palmer, Scott Bennett, Vito DOrazio, Matthew Lane, and Michael Kenwick to critique our suggested changes to the existing MID cases and our treatment of the dataset. Their feedback has been invaluable, and I thank everyone involved.

Much of the work I have performed on the data that formed the basis for the narratives was generously supported by the National Science Foundation (Awards #0923406 and #1260492). These grants provided funds for undergraduate and graduate student researchers, and this effectively led to the start of many to careers in political science. I thank the program officers at NSF, especially Brian Humes, Tim Nokken, Lee Walker, and Brian Schaffner.

On a more personal note, my wife, Julia, has always supported my workmore than even she knows. My children, too, always make life loving and fun. Doug, Mary, Sam, and Audrey are more than anyone could wish for in life; their support makes long-term projects like this one much easier.

Finally, the most inspiring scholar I have ever known was my dissertation advisor many years ago at Vanderbilt, John A. Vasquez. John is why I am a political scientist today. Of course, what I found most amazing in graduate school was that he could always predict my findings before I estimated any model, and with good precision. I often joked that John either knew the coded data really well or the real world. The irony now is that we can use this book to find out! Thanks, John. This book is dedicated to you and your work.

Doug Gibler

Birmingham, Alabama

August 2017

International Relations research has generally agreed on how to define international conflicts short of war. For example, the Militarized Interstate Dispute dataset from the Correlates of War (CoW) Project catalogues summary data on all threats, displays, and uses of force between two or more states in its dataset of international system membership. These dispute data are near-ubiquitous in quantitative analyses of international conflict and have also informed many other scholars as well. The problem with these data, however, is that there has always been very little information about these events beyond limited summary data of the conflicts, especially for cases before 1993. This book changes that by providing detailed, narrative descriptions of what transpired in each case. Organized by the pairs of states that fought in each particular geographic region, I provide these case descriptions for those interested in the causes, histories, and consequences of international conflicts.

According to Gochman and Maoz (1984), the definition of a Militarized Interstate Dispute (or MID) is the threat, display, or use of force by one state against another state. Subsequent iterations of the original 1816 to 1976 data provided by Gochman and Maoz have been amended and extended through 2010 (see Ghosn, Palmer, and Bremer 2004; Palmer et al. 2015). Over the past decade my students and I have reviewed these data and have examined each particular conflict multiple times, confirming or suggesting changes to the summary codings of each particular case. These codes include information on the dispute participants, the start and end dates, the number of fatalities, how the disputes ended, and many other pieces of information. We published our review of the data and its likely effects on various scholarship that uses the data (see Gibler, Miller, and Little 2016), and this book describes in greater detail what actually happened in each particular dispute. In short, this book provides a narrative description of what occurred during every militarized conflict between two or more states from 1816 to 2010.

The book includes 2,212 instances of conflict that we believe meet the definitions of what the CoW Project has labeled a MID. There were 244 cases of dispute in the 19th century, 1,660 in the 20th century, and 308 between 2000 and 2010. The historical record for each event often varies across time period and countries involvednews sources and even the secondary literature tends to have better information about modern, developed states. However, we did our best to confirm that every militarized conflict occurred and met the definition of a MID, and I used the information we found to construct these narratives.

The table of contents and two separate dispute lists at the end of the book should provide users with a guide for how to access particular conflicts.

However, there are a few basic presentation issues related to chapter organization and the individual entries within each chapter that I also want to explain.