Correlates of War People

Director

The Correlates of War project is headed by a director charged with overseeing and coordinating the main activities of the project. These include tracking the status of the project's data sets, convening meetings, setting data gathering priorities and directions, helping to resolve coding disputes, grant getting, and coordinating with other data collection and management efforts as appropriate. The Director serves at the pleasure of the Advisory Board and is initially appointed for a 5 year term, which is renewable.

Current Director

Zeev Maoz, University of California, Davis (since January 2013)

Past Directors

Associate Director

The associate director is responsible for the maintenance of the data archive and the more technical aspects of the project. These include maintaining and managing the web site, posting data sets, and overseeing the format of data sets and associated documentation. The COW data archive is currently managed at the Pennsylvania State University. The Associate Director serves at the pleasure of the Advisory Board for an indefinite period.

Current Associate Director

D. Scott Bennett, Pennsylvania State University (since 2005)

Advisory Board

The Correlates of War project is overseen by an advisory board, which meets twice a year at the annual meetings of the International Studies Association and Peace Science Society (International) respectively. The board is composed of 9 voting members. Three of these members are elected from the data hosts group; the other six members are elected from nominations made by past and present members of the advisory board. The Director of the project consults with the Advisory Board on important matters and as the Director deems necessary. Final decisions about matters such as the appointment of the director and associate director, data set hosts and procedures, the adoption of new coding rules or restructuring of typologies and datasets, and the addition of new data as officially-designated COW data sets rest with the Advisory Board.

Data Hosts 

A major practical issue in collecting and releasing updated cross-national and cross-time data sets such as those collected by the COW Project has been the amount of resources needed to simultaneously maintain a large number of data sets. As a result, COW has implemented a distributed system of data set hosting based on the notion of “coordinated decentralization.” The goal is for each COW data set to obtain a semi-permanent “home” and “host,” that is, an institution and an individual who will agree to maintain a data set and the related documentation for a period of time. The care given to a data set by its host follows a set of guidelines designed to ensure continued consistency with COW standards. The Director and the COW Advisory Board are responsible for monitoring data sets and hosts.