Frozen conflicts in world politics: A new dataset
Author | Michal Smetana,Kamil Christoph Klosek,Vojtěch Bahenský,Jan Ludvík |
DOI | 10.1177/0022343320929726 |
Published date | 01 July 2021 |
Date | 01 July 2021 |
Frozen conflicts in world politics:
A new dataset
Kamil Christoph Klosek , Vojte
ˇch Bahensky
´,
Michal Smetana & Jan Ludvı
´k
Peace Research Center Prague, Department of Security Studies, Charles University
Abstract
This article introduces the first comprehensive dataset of frozen conflicts in world politics. It draws on a new, broader
conceptualization of frozen conflicts that revolves around an unresolved core issue between the warring parties and
transcends the common understanding of frozen conflicts as a recent, post-Soviet phenomenon. The authors identify
42 cases of such conflicts between 1946 and 2011 that include conflict dyads involving both regular states and ‘de
facto states’. The article describes the process of dataset construction, presents summary statistics, and identifies key
patterns concerning conflict onset, escalation, and resolution. In addition, it provides a comparison of the dataset
with enduring rivalries and strategic rivalries to situate it within existing research on conflict escalation and conflict
resolution. The dataset is presented in a cross-sectional format compatible with the Correlates of War and the
Uppsala Conflict Data Program that can be used by other researchers in peace and conflict studies to provide new
insights into the dynamics of frozen conflicts.
Keywords
dataset, de facto states, enduring rivalries, frozen conflicts, militarized interstate disputes, strategic rivalries
Introduction
One minute after midnight on 12 May 1994, a ceasefire
ended six years of bloody fighting between Armenia and
Azerbaijan. While the guns were silenced, the relation-
ship between the two countries became a textbook exam-
ple of a ‘frozen conflict’ – a protracted state of affairs in
which major hostilities have ended but the enmity
between the actors persists and re-escalation remains a
permanent threat. Both policymakers and scholars
adopted the frozen conflict label for such no-war
no-peace situations that emerged after the dissolution
of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Notwithstanding the popularity of the term among
territorially focused researchers, the concept of ‘frozen
conflict’ has remained undertheorized. Until recently,
scholars mostly explored the uniqueness of individual
cases rather than the general phenomenon as such (Welt,
2010; Chavez-Fregoso & Zivkovic, 2012; Broers, 2015;
Cornell, 2017). The bulk of this scholarship has
remained limited to single or low-N comparative case
studies (Faber, 2000; Lynch, 2004; Blank, 2008; Perry,
2009; Aggestam & Bjo
¨rkdahl, 2011). Furthermore, the
scope has been mostly limited to a few prominent post-
Cold War cases. Recent research has, however, singled
out frozen conflicts as a category of conflicts that is
neither spatially nor temporally specific (Dembinska &
Campana, 2017; Ferna
´ndez-Molina, 2019; Ganguly
et al., 2019; Smetana & Ludvı
´k, 2019).
To facilitate a more holistic and rigorous study of this
phenomenon, we have developed a dataset of frozen
conflicts from 1946 to 2011. We draw on a new con-
ceptualization to identify dyadic relationships including
both regular states and de facto states. The Frozen Con-
flict Dataset (FCD) benefits scholarly research in two
ways. First, it enables broadening of the empirical scope
of frozen conflict scholarship. We identified 42 cases of
frozen conflicts, the majority of which have not yet been
Corresponding author:
kamil.klosek@fsv.cuni.cz
Journal of Peace Research
2021, Vol. 58(4) 849–858
ªThe Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343320929726
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