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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
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://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/1... href=" https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/09/02/world-war-ii-was-75-years-ago-big-wars-can-still-happen/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/... href=" https://duckofminerva.com/2020/08/we-all-suffer-if-the-field-is-parochial.html">https://duckofminerva.com/2020/08/w...
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/19/why-race-matters-international-relations-ir/
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& #39;s more! We also kept records of another 90 wars that didn& #39;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& #39;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& #39;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
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& #39;re interested, Project Mars & supporting documentation can be downloaded here: 9/10
https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/DUO7IE">https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.x...
https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/DUO7IE">https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.x...
And the book is here: https://www.amazon.com/Divided-Armies-Battlefield-Performance-International/dp/0691192448
Finis.">https://www.amazon.com/Divided-A...
Finis.">https://www.amazon.com/Divided-A...
