As I started to look at forming a Large-n research design, I realized that it may be too complicated to try to measure when peacekeeping forces were utilized in a country, and when the United States took an irregular warfare approach in a country. This approach set me up for more of a comparative case study, so I needed to focus on one or the other to have a quantative research approach. I will be looking at the Intra-State War Data from the Correlates of War Project, specifically looking at civil wars for central control.[1]

I decided to look at the use of peacekeeping forces separately. The dataset I would like to look at is whether a civil war became an international conflict. Intervention in a certain conflict by the international community will be my dependent variable (DV). I would like to take the DV, and see if there is a correlation with the amount of time spent on the ground, as well as the outcome of a particular conflict. The Intra-State War Data provides data for both outcome, and time spent on the ground.[2]By choosing wars for central control, I am able to separate similar cases regardless of region. The codebook defines when “internationalized war” is now a war controlled by the intervening entity, but the limitation of this data set is that it does not take into account what constitutes the minimum requirement for “internationalized war.”[3]This could potentially harm the ability to make a correlation between intervention, and a correlation to time spent on the ground, or a correlation to a specified outcome.

[1]Correlates of War Project. “Intra-State Wars v4.1 Data.” 2018. http://correlatesofwar.org/data-sets/COW-war.

[2]Ibid.

[3]Correlates of War Project. “Intra-State Wars v4.0.” 2018. http://correlatesofwar.org/data-sets/COW-war.

Notes

Correlates of War Project. “Intra-State Wars v4.0 Codebook.” 2018. http://correlatesofwar.org/data-sets/COW-war.

Correlates of War Project. “Intra-State Wars v4.1 Data.” 2018. http://correlatesofwar.org/data-sets/COW-war.