The Commercial Military Actor Database

• DOI: 10.1177/00220027211072528
• Author: Ulrich Petersohn,Leila Kellgren-Parker,Charlotte Penel,Vanessa Gottwick
• Published date: 01 May 2022
• Date: 01 May 2022
• Subject Matter: Data Set Features

Data Set Feature

Journal of Conf‌lict Resolution

2022, Vol. 66(4-5) 899–923

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00220027211072528

journals.sagepub.com/home/jcr

The Commercial Military

Actor Database

Ulrich Petersohn

1

, Vanessa Gottwick

1

, Charlotte Penel

1

, and

Leila Kellgren-Parker

1

Abstract

This article introduces the Commercial Military Actor Database (CMAD), a dataset

able to support research on civil war and commercial military actors. First, the CMAD

covers all civil wars from 1980 to 2016 across all of the world’s regions except Europe,

which enables the investigation of long-term regional and global trends. Second, the

CMAD encompasses the corporate market segment and mercenary outf‌its, which

facilitates the analysis of how those actors have impacted conf‌licts differently. Third,

containing detailed information about the relationships behind exchanges, the CMAD

allows users to disaggregate market exchanges. Using the CMAD’s new data, we

examined trends in the market for force, and demonstrate the data’s added value. We

re-examining Akcinaroglu and Radziszewski’s study on how private military and se-

curity companies affect the duration of civil war. The f‌indings show that the market’s

inf‌luence on conf‌lict can only be fully understood by including corporate and mer-

cenary actors.

Keywords

civil war, private military and security companies, mercenaries, market for force

1

Politics, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

Corresponding Author:

Ulrich Petersohn, University of Liverpool, Roxby Building, Liverpool L69 7ZT, UK.

Email: U.Petersohn@liverpool.ac.uk

Introduction

Over the course of the last decade, quantitative research on civil wars has f‌lourished.

The f‌irst wave of studies focused on where and when conf‌licts have broken out by

investigating country-specif‌ic variables such as gross domestic product, terrain, and

regime type (Collier and Hoeff‌ler 2004;Fearon and Laitin 2003). In time, however,

researchers began exploring the characteristics of the actors involved in the conf‌licts,

and, as a result, investigations into rebel groups and militias have signif‌icantly en-

hanced current understandings of conf‌lict dynamics (Carey, Mitchell and Lowe 2013;

Cunningham, Gleditsch and Salehyan 2009). Nevertheless, the role of commercial

military actors (CMA), who provide force and force-related services for f‌inan cial

compensation, in civil wars has largely been neglected, even despite early evidence

from case studies revealing their effects on civil war dynamics (Shearer 1998). Al-

though systematic analyses based on larger datasets have more recently been un-

dertaken (Akcinaroglu and Radziszewski 2013;Lees and Petersohn 2021;Petersohn

2014a,2017,2021b;Radziszewski and Akcinaroglu 2020;Tkach 2017), all have relied

on rather limited data, which has precluded investigations into long-term trends,

circumscribed the geographical scope of study, and/or reduced the detail of the market

dynamics involved.

The subject of this article, the Commercial Military Actor Dataset (CMAD), ad-

dresses many of those current limitations in data concerning civil wars and CMAs. The

CMAD identif‌ies exchange events on the market involving CMAs, including mer-

cenaries and private military and security companies (PMSCs), in all countries that

have experienced civil war or armed conf‌lict across all world regions, except Europe,

between 1980 and 2016.

1

The dataset specif‌ically seeks to facilitate investigations into

CMAs, their relationships with clients, and, more generally, their impact on conf‌licts

and the prospect of peace. In the subsequent sections, we compare the CMAD to pre-

existing datasets, highlighting differences in the means of data collection, the variables

considered, and limitations. Thereafter, we demonstrate the new data’s added value by

re-examining Akcinaroglu and Radziszewski’s (2013) inf‌luential study on how PMSCs

affect the duration of civil wars.

Pre-Existing Data About Commercial Military Actors

To date, three datasets offer information about PMSCs: the Private Security Dataset

(PSD), the Private Security Event Dataset (PSED), and Akcinaroglu and Radzis-

zewski’s (AandR) dataset (Akcinaroglu and Radziszewski 2020;Avant and Neu 2019;

Branovic 2011). However, as demonstrated in this section, they all differ from the

CMAD in crucial respects.

Published in 2011, the PSD focuses solely on public clients, including governments

and international organizations, and their contractual relationships with PMSCs. Such

exclusivity limits its analytical value for research on civil wars, however, because

opposition actors and transnational corporations (TNCs) are not included, even despite

900 Journal of Conf‌lict Resolution 66(4-5)