Militarized Interstate Dispute Locations (v1.1)

Overview

The Militarized Interstate Dispute Location (MIDLOC) dataset details the precise geographic onset location of Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs) in the post-Napoleonic era (from 1816-2001).  The MIDLOC data offer a single point location to represent the onset of each individual MID between 1816 and 1992.  For the period 1993-2001, the data are more detailed, identifying a single point location for individual incidents within each MID.  Following common convention, latitude and longitude point coordinates are recorded for each observation.  Latitude is measured as the angular distance, in decimalized degrees (DD), of a point north or south of the equator.  Similarly, longitude is measured as the angular distance, in decimalized degrees (DD), of a point east or west of the Prime (Greenwich) Meridian. 

There are a total of 3865 individual MIDLOC records. This is comprised of recorded onset locations for 2240 of 2332 independent MIDs from the MID 3.0 dataset—96% data coverage. 1939 of these 2240 took place between 1816 and 1992 and 301 between 1993 and 2001.  In addition to the MID-level data, this dataset also includes incident-level location data for the period 1993-2001.  There are 2122 incident-level records that comprise the 301 MIDs during this period.  196 of these 2122 records currently contain missing values.  Of these, however, only 3 are missing locations for the onset incident within the MID.

Citation

In any papers or publications that utilize this data set, users are asked to give the version number and cite the data set, as follows:

Braithwaite, Alex. 2010. “MIDLOC: Introducing the Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) Location Dataset.” Journal of Peace Research 47: 91-98.

Data Set

The data are distributed in a flat text, comma-separated-variable (.csv) file.  All text variables (MID21Location,  MIDLOClocation) are enclosed in quotation marks.  By default under Microsoft Windows, .csv files will open in Microsoft Excel.  But the file may be opened in any program that reads text.  In the statistical analysis program Stata, the file may be easily loaded using the command “insheet using MIDLOC_1.1.csv”. Note that values of -9 or -9999 designate missing values, and must be treated as such for appropriate analysis.

The variables in the data set are as follows.

Questions and Feedback

The contiguity data sets are hosted by Alex Braithwaite, University of Arizona, under the COW Data Hosting Program. In case of questions or concerns concerning the data or coding rules, he may be contacted by email at abraith@arizona.edu.