Recent scholarship has called attention to how Western-centric biases shape our understandings of war --- including which belligerents & wars matter for our studies.

A quick thread, drawing on data from my book, Divided Armies. 1/10

The exclusion of non-Western cases from our studies of war amounts to a wicked selection bias, as noted recently by @kelly_zvobgo & @meredithloken, @Prof_BearB, & @daveckang 2/10

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/19/why-race-matters-international-relations-ir/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/09/02/world-war-ii-was-75-years-ago-big-wars-can-still-happen/

https://duckofminerva.com/2020/08/we-all-suffer-if-the-field-is-parochial.html

For Divided Armies, we built a new dataset, Project Mars, that sought to incorporate these excluded belligerents and wars. A team of 134 coders worked for nearly 7 years to add 124 new belligerents & dozens of wars not included in the Correlates of War for 1800-2011. 3/10

You can see the expanded coverage of Project Mars here

But wait, there's more! We also kept records of another 90 wars that didn't meet our inclusion criteria, in large part because the evidentiary record was poor. But future historical work might change this! Need to know what we don't know to assess our blindspots 5/10

We also created a 1,200 page bibliography as a "starter pack" for scholars interested in moving off the beaten path & including new (non-Western) wars and cases. 6/10

And, for every new belligerent, we collected photographic and written records, including maps, of how they fought, to show these belligerents were not "primitive" but understood modern principles of conventional war. 7/10

Why go to all this trouble? (That's a good question).

It turns out that when you add these new belligerents & wars to the mix, many of our leading theories of military effectiveness no longer find much empirical support. (Looking at you, regime type and material power). 8/10

Anyways, if you're interested, Project Mars & supporting documentation can be downloaded here: 9/10

https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/DUO7IE

And the book is here: https://www.amazon.com/Divided-Armies-Battlefield-Performance-International/dp/0691192448

Finis.