Contentious Issues, Early Warning, and Issue Management: The Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) Project

Compilation of data on conflict within or between states has increased greatly since the Cold War ended. Yet almost all of this work has focused on episodes where military force has been threatened or used, and often on episodes that have produced numerous fatalities. This paper calls for a more systematic focus on contentious issues independent from knowledge of the threat or use of military force, and discusses the contributions that are being made by the Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) project. A focus on issues provides many potential benefits for both theory and policy, including the possibility of early warning before armed conflict breaks out and the possibility of a greater understanding of how issues may be managed or settled peacefully without the resort to violence. Paper presented at the conference "Identifying Wars: Systematic Conflict Research and Its Utility in Conflict Resolution and Prevention," Uppsala, Sweden, June 2001. More information about the ICOW project (including codebooks and publicly released data) is available at . Contentious Issues, Early Warning, and Issue Management: The Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) Project Great strides have been made in the collection of systematic data on conflict in world politics. Expanding beyond the pioneering work of Quincy Wright and Lewis Fry Richardson, the Correlates of War (COW) project has spent more than three decades collecting data on full-scale wars within and between states, militarized interstate disputes (MIDs), and numerous other phenomena such as alliances, intergovernmental organizations, and national material capabilities. More recent years have seen the collection of data on international crises from the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) project, data on military interventions from Herbert Tillema and Frederic Pearson among others, events data on a larger number of interactions between states or other actors from the KEDS, PANDA, and GEDS projects, and an increasing variety of other data sets on armed conflict (many of which are being presented at this conference, such as the Uppsala and Kosimo data projects). In short, there are now dozens of data sets that go well beyond the early compilations of Wright, Richardson, or Singer and Small's Wages of War. These new data sets range from exclusively interstate conflict to exclusively intrastate conflict, with several including both. Some of these data sets include armed conflicts producing as few as one battle death (or none for the MID and ICB data sets and many events data sets), while some require a thousand or more deaths in combat, and some include both civilian and military fatalities. In most cases, though, the emphasis is on armed conflict (and often armed conflict that produces fatalities). This paper presents a somewhat different approach to data collection, emphasizing disagreements between states rather than armed conflict or fatalities. The Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) project has been active at Florida State University since 1997. The primary goal of this project is the collection of systematic data on contentious issues between states, with a focus on identifying the issues regardless of any particular action that may or may not have been taken to resolve them. This paper begins by laying out the general framework of an issues approach to world politics, illustrating what such an approach includes and suggesting some of its potential benefits. It then traces past attempts to collect data on issues, before focusing primarily on the ICOW project. As will be seen, this project and the issues approach more generally offer numerous potentially important contributions to the systematic study of world politics. For example, an issues approach offers the hope of identifying potential adversaries before their disagreements explode into armed conflict of war (with all of the complications such outcomes entail). Additionally, a focus on issues integrates tightly with the study of armed conflict as well as the study of conflict management or resolution, offering importance advances beyond simply treating armed conflict as the primary phenomenon of interest. An Issues Approach to World Politics The standard realist approach describes world politics as a struggle for power (Morgenthau