Strategies and Tactics in Armed Conflict

Data Feature article

Strategies and Tactics in Armed Conflict:  How Governments and Foreign Interveners Respond to Insurgent Threats

Patricia Sullivan, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Johannes Karreth, Ursinus College

We introduce a new dataset on the strategies and tactics employed by belligerents in 197 internal armed conflicts that occurred between 1945 and 2013. The STAC dataset provides scholars with a rich new source of information to facilitate investigations of how regimes and their foreign supporters have responded to insurgent threats and the effects of actors’ force employment choices on a wide variety of intra- and post-conflict outcomes. In addition to 17 novel variables that measure the strategies and tactics employed by governments and intervening states, the STAC dataset contains independently-coded measures of many variables that overlap with existing datasets—a feature that facilitates the replication of existing studies and robustness checks on the results of new studies. We demonstrate the utility of the STAC data with an analysis of the impact of rebel mobilization on the basis of ethnicity on the propensity of governments to employ forced resettlement, civilian protection, civilian welfare projects, and civilian targeting to counter the insurgent threat.

Citation:
Sullivan, Patricia Lynne, and Johannes Karreth (2019) Strategies and Tactics in Armed Conflict: How Governments and Foreign Interveners Respond to Insurgent Threats. Journal of Conflict Resolution 63 (9): 2207-2232. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002719828103

Dataset

STAC conflict cases list Nov 2018

Strategies and Tactics in Armed Conflict (STAC) dataset on Harvard Dataverse

Codebook

STAC Codebook and Bibliography_2018

STAC Codebook and updated Bibliography_September 2019

Coding Notes

STAC Case Notes Vol 1_ 401961 to 5171997

STAC Case Notes Vol 2_ 5201982 to 9101989