Making Ends Meet: Combining Organizational Data in Contentious Politics

A growing number of datasets collect information reflecting the behavior and characteristics of contentious and violent organizations. Most of these datasets are not arranged so that they can be easily combined for analytical purposes. In particular, there is a lack of common identifiers for organizations. This creates a great deal of duplication of effort as well as many potential stumbling blocks for those who would like to combine information from different datasets for new analyses or research questions. We describe an existing effort to overcome common challenges and link organizations called the Terrorist Organization (TORG) crosswalk. We further propose a new effort, a Shared Contentious Actor Registry (SCAR), to allow for a more comprehensive and concerted effort to meet the challenges in linking data.