ABSTRACT
Questions of war and peace form the heart of analyses of international relations, and understanding the causes of interstate conflict is the main objective of the field. In order to study interstate conflict rigorously, scholars have relied on established rules and procedures for gathering information into coherent data sets that can be used to address a number of different questions. Data sets that are comprised of instances of conflict are the beginning point for serious study in the discipline. Among those data sets, the Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) data "is widely used by the scholarly community... and now clearly surpasses all other international conflict data sets combined.... MID data has also been a central part of a wide variety of studies, many of these central to the key theoretical debates in international relations research" (Diehl et al. 1999).
