State Failure Dataset
Political Instability Task Force and George Mason University
To provide data on ethnic wars, revolutionary wars, genocides and politicides, and adverse regime changes to inform analyses of the correlates of political instability and state failure since 1955.
US Government
The data is used as inputs for a range of academic studies.
Based on expert coding of reference materials.
161 countries with populations greater than 500,000 worldwide.
Dr. Monty G. Marshall
Director of Research
Center for Global Policy
George Mason University
mmarsha5@gmu.edu
Tel. +1 (703) 993-8177
The research team uses sources of available documentation to code (according to a codebook) the various different conflicts.
Different scales are used for different data points.
The data can be used to provide a snapshot of the extent of fighting which is affecting a country.
The dataset cannot provide information on the impetus for state failure, nor can it provide any picture of any tension. Thus results will change only at the point of failure and the data will not aid prevention.
In using this index one implicitly assumes that the data is drawn from a representative and unbiased selection of sources. In addition, the weighting used to calculate the magnitude of failure assumes that the number of combatants is usually of equal importance to the number of fatalities.
