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Civil War And Health Datasets

by Christopher Albon on June 8, 2009

Acquiring sub-state data on conflict is difficult. Conflict — by its nature — often destroys the very infrastructure used to collect health and related data. The end result is that civil wars are often “black boxes” with regard to quantitative data. Below are three sources of sub-state data on civil wars relating to health.

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The Global Terrorism Database has information on more than 80,000 terrorist attacks from 1970 to 2007. GTD claims to be the most comprehensive unclassified database on terrorist actions available. The GTD has a clear data collection methodology and a detailed codebook (a manual detailing the dataset). Click here to download.

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The Conflict Analysis Resource Center (CERAC) publishes a great dataset on the severity of the conflict in Colombia. The dataset has been used and described in a number of papers. Registration is required. Click here to download.

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Ron Francisco has constructed a series datasets on the conflict events in six wars: Archidamian War, Ireland 1922-1923, Russia 1917-1920, Spain 1936-1939, and the U.S. 1861-1865. The dataset includes: date, day, action type, location, each sides’ action, captures, injuries, deaths, description of event and original source. Click here to download.

Christopher Albon is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in armed conflict, public health, human security, and health diplomacy.

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Tagged as: Civil War, Colombia, Colombian Civil War, Data, Ireland, Irish Civil War, Killing Civilians, Russia, Russian Civil War, Spanish Civil War, Terrorism, U.S. Civil War, United States

{ 1 comment }

1 Patrick Meier June 8, 2009 at 9:38 am

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the post.

PRIO and Uppsala also have datasets that may be of interest. For example, PRIO has a Center for the Study of Civil War:

http://www.prio.no/CSCW/Datasets

I was at PRIO some three years ago doing a study with Norway’s former Secretary of State to try and empirically assess the impact of armed conflict on women’s health. We used PRIO’s battle deaths dataset as our proxy for armed conflict:

http://www.prio.no/CSCW/Datasets/Armed-Conflict/Battle-Deaths

PRIO’s Armed Conflict and Location Event dataset (ACLED) may also be of interest:

http://www.acleddata.com/index-ACLED-NEW.html

Cheers,
Patrick

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