MIDLOC: Introducing the Militarized Interstate Dispute Location dataset

Abstract

The Militarized Interstate Dispute Location (MIDLOC) dataset addresses a significant lacuna in the empirical literature on the geography of interstate conflict: the dearth of location-level data. This dataset provides details of the geographic location of Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) onsets between 1816 and 2001. These data on locations are available at both the dispute-level (for 1816—2001) and the incident-level (for 1993—2001). This article briefly identifies the motivation behind this data-collection project, details some of the coding procedures followed in assembling the MIDLOC dataset, and then offers some mapped visualizations of the variance in this dataset across time. These maps are designed, in part, to stimulate additional hypothesis derivation in work on the geography of conflict. The data are then employed to offer a geographic assessment of the proposition that democracies tend to conduct the majority of their conflicts on their opponents’ territories. The article then concludes with a discussion of some additional potential applications of the MIDLOC dataset.