Calender Time Onset and Duration of Intrastate Conflict, 2004

Description

The causes of armed conflict is most common focus among conflict researchers, and the Armed Conflict Dataset has repeatedly been used to analyze this problem. Previous versions have not contained an authoritative definition of what an onset is, and this has caused unnecessary confusion. With this release, we also provide users with a clear and user-friendly operational definition of conflict onset.

The calendar-time data structure, in comparison, allows for much more thorough robustness checks. This structure, originally presented by Raknerud & Hegre (1997), is based on observations of all independent countries on the day where one of them experienced an onset. Since the relevant control group is closely linked to the observation on an onset, several types of filters can be applied within the same dataset, in order to check for robustness along various dimensions.