The International Military Intervention Dataset: An Updated Resource for Conflict Scholars
| Date | 01 July 2009 |
| Author | Emizet F. Kisangani,Jeffrey Pickering |
| Published date | 01 July 2009 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343309334634 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
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© The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and permissions:
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vol. 46, no. 4, 2009, pp. 589 –599
Sage Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi,
Singapore and Washington DC) http://jpr.sagepub.com
DOI 10.1177/0022343309334634
SPECIAL
DATA
FEATURE
The International Military Intervention Dataset:
An Updated Resource for Conflict Scholars*
JEFFREY PICKERING & EMIZET F. KISANGANI
Department of Political Science, Kansas State University
As major wars have become uncommon over recent decades and the efficacy of economic sanctions
is questioned, foreign military intervention seems to have become increasingly prevalent on the inter-
national scene. Military intervention has also gained a degree of moral legitimacy, as it is now often
launched for humanitarian ends rather than simply to further the intervener’s strategic or material
interests. Despite the apparent increase in the use of foreign military intervention as a policy tool in
recent years, the quantitative international conflict literature continues to operate without either a com-
prehensive or a current inventory of foreign military interventions. The authors attempt to fill this gap
by updating Pearson & Baumann’s International Military Intervention (IMI) dataset from 1989 to
2005. IMI has a number of attributes that should make it attractive to quantitative international conflict
scholars. One is that it is one of a small handful of interstate conflict datasets that attempts to discern
the motives behind state uses of force. Also, its substantive coverage is broad, allowing researchers to
separate out and focus on the forms of intervention (supportive, hostile, humanitarian, territorial, etc.)
that are relevant to their research. As a preliminary validity test of the updated data, the authors analyze
patterns of Cold War and post-Cold War military intervention in the IMI collection to see if they
correspond with conventional wisdom on real world events.
security issues’ ( Hermann & Kegley, 2001:
237). As major wars have become uncom-
mon over recent decades and the efficacy and
morality of expensive and typically lengthy
economic sanctions is questioned (Weiss,
1999), foreign military intervention seems
to have become increasingly prevalent on the
international scene.
Intervention has also gained a degree of
moral legitimacy, as it is now often launched
for humanitarian ends rather than simply to
further the intervener’s strategic or material
interests. Talentino (2002: 28) observes
that ‘while intervention was once taboo, a
permissive environment now seems to exist
that legitimates intervention on normative
grounds’. The normative shift is so sub-
stantial that foreign military intervention
* We are grateful to the NSF for funding (award 0518294)
that allowed us to complete this dataset, which is available
from the ICPSR at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
(collection no. 21282) and at http://www.prio.no/jpr/
datasets. We thank Robert Baumann, Benjamin Fordham,
Nils Petter Gleditsch, Scott Gates, Frederic Pearson,
William R. Thompson and the participants at an October
2006 presentation at PRIO for suggestions. Among
the many research assistants that helped with our data-
collection efforts, we give special thanks to Melia Young,
Orlandrew Danzell, and Katy Rubiano. All errors in this
special data feature article and the data are, of course, the
authors alone. Please direct correspondence to jjp@ksu.edu
or emizetk@ksu.edu.
Introduction
Hermann & Kegley (1996: 440) maintain
that foreign military intervention is ‘arguably
the most frequent type of military force in use
and under debate today’. As a consequence, it
is, in their words, ‘one of today’s most pressing
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