ICOW Quarterly Review Methodology

This page describes the basic methodology used in creating the Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) Project's quarterly and annual reviews, including how relevant news stories are identified as well as how we classify the variouds types of escalatory and cooperative events.

Identifying Claims

All ICOW contentious issue data sets share similar definitions, with the goal of ensuring that the states in question are clearly disagreeing over the issue. Broadly speaking, it must be the official policy of the challenger state to demand a change over the issue, and the target state must disagree with this demand (at least initially). There are three key elements in this definition:

Official state representatives: the claim must be stated by one or more individuals who are authorized to make foreign policy for the state.
Explicit contention: these leaders must be explicit about their disagreement over the issue. Analysts can not guess or assume; no claim can be coded unless they specifically mention a disagreement over territorial sovereignty, the usage or condition of a shared river or maritime zone, or the status or treatment of a shared ethnic group.
Specific issue: the leader(s) must refer to a specific piece of territory, river, maritime zone, or ethnic group for a claim to be codable. General statements calling for "Lebensraum," "a route to the sea," "fresh water," or the like do not qualify unless the leaders make clear where they intend to achieve these goals.

More detail on the project is available on the ICOW Project home page as well as in Hensel and Mitchell's 2017 Conflict Management and Peace Science paper "From Territorial Claims to Identity Claims: The Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) Project." [you may prefer the journal's official page for this article if your library has access]

Types of Claims

The ICOW project currently collects data on four types of issues: territorial, river, maritime, and identity claims:

Territorial Claims: Explicit contention between two or more nation-states claiming sovereignty over a specific piece of territory. Official government representatives (i.e., individuals who are authorized to make or state foreign policy positions for their governments) must make explicit statements claiming sovereignty over the same territory.
River Claims: Explicit contention between two or more nation-states over the use or abuse of a specific river (or river system). Official government representatives (i.e., individuals who are authorized to make or state foreign policy positions for their governments) must make explicit statements contesting the usage of that river, typically involving concerns of water quality (e.g. pollution), water quantity (e.g. dams or diversion of water for irrigation), or navigation along the river.
Maritime Claims: Explicit contention between two or more nation-states over the use of a specific maritime zone. Official government representatives (i.e., individuals who are authorized to make or state foreign policy positions for their governments) must make explicit statements contesting the usage of that maritime zone, typically for matters like fishing or navigation.
Identity Claims: Explicit contention between two or more nation-states over the status or treatment of a shared ethnic group. Official government representatives (i.e., individuals who are authorized to make or state foreign policy positions for their governments) must make explicit demands regarding the group in question, ranging from demands for better treatment or equal rights to demands for the group's autonomy, secession, or even unification with the challenger state.

Claim Participants

ICOW only collects data on interstate claims of each type, meaning that there must be at least one nation-state on both the challenger and target side of the claim. Like many international relations scholars, we rely on the standard Correlates of War (COW) interstate system membership list to identify states.

Endorsement of Specific Claims

The ICOW project and its participants do not take or endorse any official positions with respect to any of the claims in our data set. We are attempting to identify cases where nation-states have disagreed over specific types of contentious issues, as well as measuring what made those issues salient and studying how they chose to manage or settle those issues, and we have no interest in endorsing or supporting either side's position in any of these issues. For the purpose of these quarterly and annual reviews, we list all claim participants alphabetically, and where relevant we attempt to list multiple names for disputed territories that are commonly referenced in English language sources; if one country's preferred name for the territory is listed, but another's is not, this should not be taken to imply that we believe the former has a stronger claim or that we oppose the latter's claim.

News Searches

These quarterly reviews are compiled from daily news searches while the quarter is underway. This includes more than 30 RSS news feeds representing a variety of different perspectives and geographic emphases such as Al Jazeera, All Africa (which includes Africa-related stories from hundreds of sources), the Arab Weekly, Baltic News Network, BBC, Deutsche Welle, the East African, Journal du Cameroun (which includes stories from the Agence France-Presse and Agence de Presse Africaine news agencies), Mainichi (which includes stories from the Associated Press and Kyodo news agencies), New York Times, TASS, and Times of Central Asia. The list of RSS feeds changes periodically, as previously useful news sources end their RSS service (as happened with Xinhua) or as new sources are discovered that appear to be useful; the goal is to identify sources that cover global or regional news rather than focusing on individual states. Beyond these specific news feeds, we also run saved Google News searches each day for nearly 300 permutations of search terms such as "border clash," "boundary accord," "territorial claim," "undemarcated border," "maritime delimitation," "fishing talks," "river treaty," "dam dispute," and many others; these searches should identify any story with any of these search terms that is published in any of the more than 4500 English language sources that are searched by Google News.

Each news story that comes up from these searches is read for indications of a potential or ongoing territorial, river, maritime, or identity claim. If a claim is already known to be ongoing based on ICOW research, any events over that claim that meet the descriptions on this page are recorded in the "Claim Escalation and Provocations" or "Peaceful Claim Management" section of the quarterly review. If no claim is known to be ongoing, the events in the story are investigated more closely to determine whether they represent a new claim; if not, the situation is noted in the "Potential Claims" section of the quarterly review.

Claim Escalation and Provocations

An important part of contentious issues is militarized action or other provocative behavior. Such events carry the risk of escalation to war, and are thus important to early warning of especially dangerous situations. We record both events involving the threat or use of military forces and events that involve non-military provocations by political leaders or civilians.

Militarized Action:

These events involve the threat or use of military force by nation-states. These actions could be directed at other nation-state forces and/or civilians, as long as they are directly related to the claim in question.

Fatal conflict: any activity that leads to claim-related deaths, whether among military forces or civilians. Note that to be listed as fatal conflict, the deaths must have been caused by the actions of states or state-backed actors.
Military activity: activity in the disputed area, or directly related to the claim, that involves the military; examples include border violations, buildup or fortification along the border, military exercises, or non-fatal clashes or other incidents.
Action against civilians: military activity directed against civilians; examples include seizing fishing boats in disputed waters, or interfering with farms or villages in disputed territory.
Military threat: a threat by political or military leadership to use the military to act, or to respond to actions, in the disputed area or otherwise directly related to the claim.
Other military provocation: any other provocative activity involving the military forces of one or both states.

Non-Militarized Action:

These events do not involve military threats or actions, but still represent provocations related to the claim in question.

Non-military activity: activity in the disputed area, or directly related to the claim, that does not involves the military; examples include domestic legislation or agreements with other parties concerning the disputed area, construction or oil exploration in the disputed area, and the imposition of sanctions related to the claim.
Verbal provocation: provocations that involve the spoken or written word rather than physical activity in a disputed territory; examples include verbal statements demanding territorial sovereignty or rejecting any possibility of negotiations, or printing disputed maps.
Other non-military provocation: any other provocative activity by one of the claimant states that does not involve the military.

Other Provocations:

These events are not currently counted in our quarterly reviews of provocative and cooperation events over claims, because they do not involve actions by the governments of the claimant states, but we still track them for possible use later.

Civilians: provocations related to the claim that are conducted by civilians from one of the claimant states, but are not sanctioned by their government.
Third party: provocations related to the claim that are conducted by one or more third parties (such as states, international organizations, or institutions) rather than the claimants themselves; examples include verbal statements or naval deployment near disputed areas that are intended to send a signal to one or both claimants.
Undocumented allegations: unsupported or undocumented claims by civilians or members of government who are not authorized to make foreign policy; examples include unsubstantiated claims by opposition politicians that the enemy has occupied territory or otherwise committed provocations in the disputed area.

Peaceful Claim Management

Although armed conflict and militarization make the most headlines, published research has shown that even territorial claims -- the most conflict-prone of these four issues -- see far more episodes of peaceful conflict management than armed conflicts over the claim.

Peaceful Claim Settlement Techniques

We recognize three broad types of attempts to manage or settle contentious issues:

Bilateral negotiations: face-to-face talks between the claimant states without any third party participation.
Non-binding third party activity: talks with the assistance of one or more third parties, but no legally binding obligation to agree to any particular settlement suggestion. The most frequent examples are good offices (where the third party facilitates communication between the claimants) and mediation (where the third party is involved more actively and suggests possible solutions).
Binding third party activity: submission of the claim to a legally binding decision by the third party (arbitration or adjudication), which both claimants agree to accept before the process begins.

Scope of Attempts/Agreements

Each peaceful settlement attempt, and each agreement that is produced, is coded for the scope of the attempt/agreement with respect to the claim in question:

Functional: settlement attempts or agreements that address the usage of the disputed issue (such as a territory, river, or maritime zone), although they do not address the substance of the issue. Examples includes agreements to demilitarize a disputed territory or to cooperate in exploration or resource extraction.
Procedural: settlement attempts or agreements that address future procedures to settle the issue peacefully, even though they do not settle the issue directly. Examples include agreement to submit the dispute to an institution like the International Court of Justice, or to settle the dispute through a plebiscite in the disputed territory.
Substantive: settlement attempts or agreements that seek to settle part or all of the issue. Examples include agreeing on sovereignty over a disputed territory or maritime zone, or settling the substance of a dispute over sharing water from an international river. (Note that not all substantive agreements will end the issue, depending on ratification or compliance)

Other Peaceful Claim Management Activities

These are other activities that represent cooperation or improved relations over the issue, without directly attempting to settle it:

Confidence building: activities to increase cooperation and reduce the risk of escalation. Typical examples include withdrawing military forces from a disputed territory or creating a joint commission to investigate incidents.
Demarcation progress: progress in demarcating an already agreed border. In most cases, this comes after a territorial claim has already ended, but it is still a useful sign of progress.
Implementation of agreements: progress toward implementing a previous agreement, not involving new negotiations or settlement activity as described above.
Peacekeeping: deployment of third party military forces between the combatants, to keep their forces separated and reduce the risk of escalation. UN peacekeeping forces are most common, but other states or organizations have also deployed peacekeepers.
Progress toward settlement: progress toward settling a claim in some other way that does not fit any of the other categories.
Proposal for mediation/talks: requests for bilateral talks or third party mediation (or other settlement activity), calls by a third party for negotiations, or offers by a third party to mediate (or otherwise help to manage/settle) the issue. Note that this category only includes proposals that were not acted on during this quarter; if talks began, the events should be classified by the type of settlement activity, as described above.
Ratification: progress in finalizing an agreement that was reached previously. in many political systems, treaties or agreements need to be approved or ratified by the parliament or legislature before they can take effect. Ratification by one or both states, or the exchange of completed ratification documents, may occur months or even years after the treaty was signed.
Other cooperation: any other peaceful activity related to the claim in at least a procedural or functional way, as described above. Examples include allowing flights/travel or commerce involving a disputed area.

Potential Claims

Each quarter sees dozens of situations that resemble claims in some respects, but do not meet the full definition listed above. Even though these do not currently qualify as codable claims, they are worth monitoring in case conditions change and they eventually qualify, and they help to illustrate the definitions and coding rules that the ICOW project uses to identify claims.

No explicit contention: situations where observers speculate that there is a claim, but the supposed challenger state does not make any explicit demands that would qualify.
No specific claim: situations where the supposed challenger state may be dissatisfied, but does not make any codable demands over a specific territory, river, maritime zones, or ethnic group.
No official government actor: situations where nationalist parties, private citizens, or even local governments make demands, but their national-level government does not back them up.
No codable EPR/TEK group: situations where a government makes demands that look like an identity claim, but the ethnic group in question is not coded by the Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) or Transborder Ethnic Kin (TEK) data set as present in both states. Those data sets are the state of the art in research on ethnic conflict, and we rely on their judgment to identify ethnic groups (rather than trying to collect an entirely new data set on ethnicity). Realistically, even if we coded any identity claims involving groups that are not included in the EPR/TEK data, they would drop out of most analyses due to missing data because so many of the relevant data sets are based on the EPR/TEK data.
Other reasons: any other reason that a situation does not qualify as a claim.

ICOW Quarterly Review Methodology

Paul R. Hensel (University of North Texas)
Issue Correlates of War Project

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