What are they fighting for? Completion, integration, and publication of data on conflict issues

What do rebels fight for when they go to war? Surprisingly, our knowledge regarding this question is scarce, even though all civil wars involve contested issues: the specific demands, grievances, or desires that warring parties go to war over, and despite issues being one of the cornerstones of the theoretical concept of conflict. Understanding what conflict issues are fought over promises to open up new avenues towards understanding conflict resolution.

The purpose of this infrastructure project is to complete an existing data collection on the issues that parties go to war over to provide a sought-after public good for the scientific community.

Current data on conflict issues covers only the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa. Global data is necessary for scientific, representative, and cross-case analyses of how conflict issues affect the origins, dynamics, and resolution of conflict. Additionally, resources are required to integrate conflict issue data into the Uppsala Conflict Data Program’s (UCDP) infrastructure.

Such integration will ensure that data become available both through the UCDP’s line-up of datasets and via the online Conflict Encyclopedia.

The purpose of the project is twofold: (1) to produce global conflict issues data, and (2) to release, integrate, and disseminate global data on conflict issues, providing the research community with a missing piece of data for understanding the origins, dynamics, and resolution of civil wars.