Strategies and Tactics in Armed Conflict: How Governments and Foreign Interveners Respond to Insurgent Threats

• Author: Johannes Karreth,Patricia Lynne Sullivan
• DOI: 10.1177/0022002719828103
• Published date: 01 October 2019
• Date: 01 October 2019
• Subject Matter: Data Set Feature

Data Set Feature

Strategies and Tactics

in Armed Conflict: How

Governments and Foreign

Interveners Respond

to Insurgent Threats

Patricia Lynne Sullivan

1

, and Johannes Karreth

2

Abstract

We introduce a new data set on the strategies and tactics employed by

belligerents in 197 internal armed conflicts that occurred between 1945 and

2013. The Strategies and Tactics in Armed Conflict (STAC) data set provides

scholars with a rich new source of information to facilitate investigations of how

regimes and their foreign supporters have responded to insurgent threats and

the effects of actors’ force employment choices on a wide variety of intra- and

postconflict outcomes. In addition to seventeen novel variables that measure the

strategies and tactics employed by governments and intervening states, the

STAC data set contains independently coded measures of many variables that

overlap with existing data sets—a feature that facilitates the replication of existing

studies and robustness checks on the results of new studies. We demonstrate the

utility of the STAC data with an analysis of the impact of rebel mobilization on the

basis of ethnicity on the propensity of governments to employ forced resettlement,

civilian protection, civilian welfare projects, and civilian targeting to counter the

insurgent threat.

1

Department of Public Policy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

2

Department of Politics and International Relations, Ursinus College, Collegeville, PA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Patricia Lynne Sullivan, Department of Public Policy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 117

Abernethy Hall, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.

Email: tsulli@email.unc.edu

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2019, Vol. 63(9) 2207-2232

ªThe Author(s) 2019

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0022002719828103

journals.sagepub.com/home/jcr

Keywords

civil wars, internal armed conflict, military intervention, war outcomes, rebellion,

civilian casualties, insurgency, military strategy

As armed conflicts in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Syria grind on, policy makers,

military leaders, and scholars have all struggled to draw lessons from both current

and historical conflicts about the most effective strategies and tactics in internal

conflicts. Can insurgents be defeated through the use of brute force alone? Under

what conditions can governments undermine support for rebel forces by providing

security and public goods to civilians? Does leadership decapitation weaken rebel

groups? At the same time, recent conflicts have motivated academic research on the

causes of civilian victimization by government and rebel forces. Are combatants

who receive external support more likely to target civilians? Are democracies less

likely to engage in mass killing during counterinsurgency (COIN) campaigns?

To help address open questions in this research area and facilitate the systematic

investigation of new questions, this project provides the first comprehensive data

collection on the use of a variety of strategies and tactics by governments and foreign

interveners in nearly 200 internal armed conflicts from 1945 to 2013. The Strategies

and Tactics in Armed Conflict (STAC) data set builds upon existing data sets and

introduces novel variables coded from a wide variety of sources. While STAC codes

many variables contained in other widely used data sets, it introduces a series of

unique measures of specific COIN tactics—from public welfare projects and civilian

protection to strategic bombing and forced resettlement—employed by incumbent

governments and external interveners. Other variables, like our measures of troop

numbers, fatalities, and conflict outcomes, are similar to those coded by other

projects. For these variables, STAC often covers a longer time frame and/or provides

more detailed information about sources and coding decisions.

The data set is accompanied by case coding notes for each conflict, a detailed

codebook, and a bibliography of the 400þsources used to code the cases. The data

set itself identifies which sources were used to code a particular case. Each case has a

unique STAC conflict identifier as well as conflict, actor, and dyad identifiers from

the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) Armed Conflict data set (Allansson,

Melander, and Themne´r 2017; Gleditsch et al. 2002) and intrastate war name and

number from the Correlates of War project (Sarkees and Wayman 2010) whenever a

corresponding observation exists in these data sets. This will allow researchers to

easily merge in additional data and to evaluate the robustness of their findings by

comparing analyses using similar variables coded in multiple data sets. A researcher

may, for example, want to compare results of models estimated with our measure of

civilian targeting by government forces to results from a model estimated with the

one-sided violence data from UCDP.

2208 Journal of Conflict Resolution 63(9)