The Conflict and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB) Project

Abstract

As students of politics and political science, we should and we do care about the events which lead to war, instability, and international tension as well as about events which lead to equitable interdependence, integration, peace, improvement of quality of life, reduction of colonialism, and so on. Because we care about these matters, we try to advance procedures and theories about systematizing our observations and improving our skills of analysis. Recent developments in international relations have tended to (a) emphasize the exploration of more specific problems and testing of hypotheses with quantified data and (b) deemphasized the search for general theories of internation behavior. This trend appears to be undergoing slight modification for many reasons. Events contain useful information which permit a student of foreign policy to use events singularly or in the aggregate to study foreign policy outputs and inputs. A student of international systems uses events singularly or in the aggregate to study patterns, structures, and transformation. This research calls for continuously developing models and operational procedures which analyze these phenomena with faster and better numerical precision. The Conflict and Peace Data Bank Project is the contribution of myself, my students, and my colleagues to this effort.