Militarized Compellent Threats, 1918–2001

Abstract

The study of military coercion is a central topic in international relations, and in recent years research on coercive threats has yielded a long list of important theoretical innovations. In 1960, Thomas Schelling drew a distinction between threats meant to deter and those designed to compel, but empirical research about coercion has paid much more attention to deterrence than compellence. This is problematic because deterrence and compellence are thought to operate according to different dynamics. This article introduces the Militarized Compellent Threats dataset, which is designed specifically to help test hypotheses about the use and effectiveness of compellent threats in international politics. I describe the rationale behind the dataset, present coding procedures and basic descriptive statistics, and offer comparisons to several related datasets.