1International 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 inter-
national 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
- 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.
What Is a Militarized Interstate Dispute?
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 Goch-
man 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, con-
firming 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.
Chapter 1
Introduction