2 Chapter 1
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 involved—news
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.
How the Book Is Organized
The table of contents and two separate dispute lists at the end of the book should pro-
vide 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.
Dyads, Major States, and Regions
There are many possible ways of organizing the narrative entries in this book—by
dispute number, by date, by individual countries—but I chose to organize the con-
flicts according to the pair of states involved. The vast majority of disputes (almost 85
percent) are dyadic, involving one state against another state, and international
relations scholars tend to emphasize the importance of interstate relationships which
are often best captured by dyad-based studies. Thus, I organized the chapters by
the dyad and then grouped the various dyads into geographic regions according to
approximately equal sets of conflicts. North American disputes are listed in the next
chapter, followed by European disputes, sub-Sahara African disputes, disputes among
Middle Eastern states, and then finally disputes in Asia. Each dispute is ordered by the
lowest CoW country code in the dyad—these are the numbers scholars have adopted
to identify each state in the international system since 1816.
One problem with this system is that there are conflicts in which a state from one
region fought a state in another region. For these cases, I placed the narrative in the
region where all or most of the conflict occurred. This made it possible for some dyads
to be represented in multiple chapters. I also used this general rule for conflicts involv-
ing more than two states as I organized these conflicts by the dyad most associated
with the particular dispute.
Finally, in politics, some states tend to have more conflicts than others because of
their capabilities. These powerful states have the ability to reach more places across the
globe with their militaries, they often were involved in colonial and postcolonial poli-
tics in other regions, and quite often contended with each other. I separate the conflicts
of these major states into their own chapter and use the CoW Project definition of major
state to identify the cases. The major powers include the United States (from 1898
on), the United Kingdom, France (for all but the World War II years when occupied),
Germany until World War II (except 1919–1924) and after unification, Austria-Hun-
gary, Italy between 1860 and 1943, Russia or the Soviet Union (except 1918–1921),