KOSIMO: A Databank on Political Conflict

Despite the existence of a large amount of operationalized data on violent interstate conflict as one subset of political conflict, there are shortcomings in data on domestic and nonviolent conflict and growing inadequacies between the reality of political conflict and its conceptualization in quantitative conflict research. This is mainly due to fundamental changes in conflict patterns over the past few decades and an understandable fixation by researchers on violence as a central explanandum in conflict research. In response to these shortcomings, the authors propose an integrated and dynamic databank that contains nonviolent and violent as well as domestic and international political conflicts on a global scale between 1945 and 1998. The main hypothesis of the KOSIMO project states that the analysis of an integrated and dynamic databank of political conflict will lead to more accurate propositions about current and future trends of political conflict than conclusions drawn on the basis of databanks that contain exclusively violent conflicts.