Conquest and State Size Database

The data consist of 254 observations coded for seven legal categories.

These files are intended for educational and non-commercial use only. Please contact us with any questions or concerns.

 

Citation

We ask users of the database to cite it as follows:

Oona A. Hathaway & Scott J. Shapiro, Conquest and State Size Database, http://theinternationalistsbook.com/data.html. Users may also wish to reference Oona A. Hathaway & Scott J. Shapiro, The Internationalists (2017), particularly chapters 13 and 14.

 

Overview of Conquest Data

This data set begins with 838 observations drawn from the Correlates of War Territorial Change database. From here, we narrow our analysis to the subset of the data that are associated with a military conflict or were otherwise coded as a conquest by Correlates of War. These 254 observations are then coded for seven new legal categories: (1) whether sovereignty is in dispute; (2) whether the transfer was a reversion of the same land previously exchanged between the same countries; (3) whether the intervention was carried out by, or with the approval of, a multinational organization; (4) whether the transfer was recognized by the international community; (5) whether coders were able to locate a manifesto or declaration of war; (6) whether the transfer represents a division of an existing state into two or more distinct states; (7) whether the intervening state claims sovereignty over the territory.