ICOW Quarterly and Annual Reviews

These quarterly and annual reviews track major events related to international conflict and cooperation. We focus on conflict and cooperation between countries that disagree over specific types of contentious issues, in order to track how countries choose to manage, escalate, or settle their disagreements. This draws from research by the Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) research project, which has spent more than two decades collecting and analyzing data on contentious issues. The project currently studies four types of issues:

Territorial Claims: explicit contention between the official representatives of at least two nation-states regarding sovereignty over a specific piece of territory. These might involve contention over land along the border between the two states, islands, or colonial/dependent territory far from one or both sides' homes.
River Claims: explicit contention between the official representatives of at least two nation-states regarding the use or abuse of a specific international river or river system shared by the two states. These might involve contention over the quantity of water crossing the border (due to irrigation or dam projects), the quality of water (due to pollution), navigation, or flooding.
Maritime Claims: explicit contention between the official representatives of at least two nation-states regarding the use of a specific maritime zone. These might involve concerns over fishing, undersea resources such as oil, or navigation rights through the zone.
Identity Claims: explicit contention between the official representatives of at least two nation-states regarding the status of a shared ethnic group. These might involve demands for better treatment or autonomy for the group within the target state, independence of the group from the target state, or irredentist demands for the transfer of the group from the target state to the challenger state making the demands.

ICOW Site Search

This search interface allows you to search through these quarterly reviews for such terms as names of territories, countries, or leaders. (For now, this is limited to ICOW's quarterly reviews of news over territorial, river, maritime, or identity claims, covering events since the beginning of 2019. In the future, we plan to expand this search to include access to summary web pages for each of the more than 1200 claims identified by the ICOW project, which will be created as part of the next external grant that the ICOW project receives.)

Quarterly Reviews

Four quarterly reviews will be posted each year, summarizing major events in any of these four issues during the quarter. This includes new claims beginning (and potential claims that do not currently qualify but could in the future), claim provocations and escalation, and peaceful claim management and settlement. Our quarterly review methodology page explains the process of searching for news related to each of these four issue types during this quarter, and describes the types of events that are identified for inclusion in this review.

Reviews will typically be posted in the second month after the end of the quarter (e.g., the January-March quarterly review will typically be published in May), as many events during the quarter are not fully covered by news stories until weeks into the next month. Note that the format and content of these reviews is still evolving, as we get feedback from users and work to make these more useful. Please email Paul Hensel with any suggestions.

2019:

2020:

Quarter 1 (January-March)
Quarter 2 (April-June)
Quarter 3 (July-September)
Quarter 4 (October-December)

Annual Reviews

An annual review will be posted each year to summarize all that has happened in the previous year, drawing from the four quarterly updates, and put these events into the broader context of what the ICOW project has learned about contentious issues. This will be more academic in nature than the quarterly reviews, and will be comparable to the HIIK's annual Conflict Barometer or the annual Journal of Peace Research articles summarizing the Uppsala Conflict Data Program's armed conflict data.

2019 Year in Review (this first annual review will be posted in 2021, and will be limited to a summary of major events over the ICOW issues in the past year; future annual reviews will be more ambitious because there will be a longer set of events to discuss and compare)

ICOW Quarterly and Annual Reviews

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

Page Index

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