KOSIMO Data Base (29-Dec-1994)

The KOSIMO database (Pfetsch & Billing, 1994) has been developed at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. It contains more than 1400 conflicts from 1482 to 1990. For each conflict 51 attributes have been coded, 27 of which describe the conflict directly. Each conflict is assigned one of four levels of intensity:

Latent Conflict
Crisis
Severe Crisis
War

Almost all coded conflicts between 1482 and 1945 are wars; for most of them, only a partial coding was possible. Conflicts after 1945 have been coded with all of the 51 variables. The database contains 546 conflict cases as well as a seperate list of about 400 putsches for the timespan 1945 - 1990.

A thorough textual description of all cases after 1945 is available in Pfetsch (1991).
Pfetsch and Billing (1994) give a detailled description and statistical analysis of the post-1945 part of the database.
Billing (1991) contains a statistical analysis of a subset of the database that contains only the base conflicts.

Literature

Peter Billing, 1991: Eskalation und Deeskalation internationaler Konflikte Frankfurt: Peter Lang
Frank Pfetsch (Ed.), 1991: Konflikte seit 1945. Daten - Fakten - Hintergründe. Freiburg: Verlag Ploetz.
Five Volumes: "Europa", "Amerika", "Asien/Australien/Ozeanien", "Die Arabische Welt", "Schwarzafrika".
Frank Pfetsch and Peter Billing, 1994: Datenhandbuch nationaler und internationaler Konflikte Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft

Johann Petrak