ABSTRACT
This final selection recapitulates the development of the dataset on militarized interstate disputes (MIDs). In originally developing this dataset, we admittedly utilized concepts from Roget’s Thesaurus in order to develop a typology of events that was exhaustively complete (in contrast to others who relied upon incomplete concepts from the media). MIDs are unified historical cases of conflict in which the threat, display or use of military force short of war by one member state is explicitly directed towards the government, official representatives, official forces, property, or territory of another state. Disputes are composed of incidents that range in intensity from threats to use force to actual combat short of war. One of the most important things that occurs in MIDs is the interplay of moves and counter-moves between the antagonists; however, the task of distinguishing among these moves was daunting. Yet, we tried to lay out a typology and process by which one could distinguish, rank and scale such moves. The revised dispute dataset presented in this article contains information on over 2,000 disputes found to have occurred in the period 1816–1992.
