DOI: 10.3886/icpsr21282.v1
title: International Military Intervention, 1989-2005
title: Version 1

description: This project updates INTERNATIONAL MILITARY INTERVENTION
 (IMI), 1946-1988 (ICPSR 6035), compiled by Frederic S. Pearson and
 Robert A. Baumann (1993). This newer study documents 447 intervention
 events from 1989 to 2005. To ensure consistency across the full
 1946-2005 time span, Pearson and Baumann's coding procedures were
 followed. The data collection thus "documents all cases of military
 intervention across international boundaries by regular armed forces
 of independent states" in the international system (Pearson and
 Baumann, 1993). "Military interventions are defined operationally in
 this collection as the movement of regular troops or forces (airborne,
 seaborne, shelling, etc.) of one country inside another, in the
 context of some political issue or dispute" (Pearson and Baumann,
 1993). As with the original IMI (OIMI) collection, the 1989-2005
 dataset includes information on actor and target states, as well as
 starting and ending dates. It also includes a categorical variable
 describing the direction of the intervention, i.e., whether it was
 launched in support of the target government, in opposition to the
 target government, or against some third party actor within the target
 state's borders. The intensity of the military intervention is
 captured in ordinal variables that document the scale of the actor's
 involvement, "ranging from minor engagement such as evacuation, to
 patrols, act of intimidation, and actual firing, shelling or bombing"
 (Pearson and Baumann, 1993). Casualties that are a direct result of
 the military intervention are coded as well. A novel aspect of IMI is
 the inclusion of a series of variables designed to ascertain the
 motivations or issues that prompted the actor to intervene, including
 to take sides in a domestic dispute in the target state, to affect
 target state policy, to protect a socio-ethnic or minority group, to
 attack rebels in sanctuaries in the target state, to protect economic
 or resource interests, to intervene for strategic purposes, to lend
 humanitarian aid, to acquire territory or to dispute its ownership,
 and to protect its own military/diplomatic interests. There are three
 main differences between OIMI and this update. First, the variable,
 civilian casualties, which complements IMI's information on the
 casualties suffered by actor and target military personnel has been
 added. Second, OIMI variables on colonial history, previous
 intervention, alliance partners, alignment of the target, power size
 of the intervener, and power size of the target have been deleted. The
 Web-based resources available today, such as the CIA World Fact Book,
 make information on the colonial history between actor and target
 readily available. Statistical programs allow researchers to generate
 all previous interventions by the actor into the target state. Since
 competing measures and data collections are used for alliances and
 state power, it was thought best to allow analysts who use IMI the
 freedom to choose the variables or dataset that measure the phenomena
 of their choice. Third, the data collection techniques differ from
 OIMI. OIMI relied on the scouring of printed news sources such as the
 New York Times Index, Facts on File, and Keesing's to collect
 information on international military interventions, whereas the
 computer-based search engine, Lexis-Nexis Academic, was used as the
 foundation for the new study's data search. Lexis-Nexis Academic
 includes print sources as well as news wire reports and many others.
 After Lexis-Nexis searches were conducted for each year in the update
 by at least four different investigators, regional sources, the United
Nations Web site, and secondary works were consulted.
description: All verified cases of international military intervention
from 1989 to 2005.
description: Datasets: 
DS1: International Military Intervention, 1989-2005
description: All cases of military interventions from 1989 through
2005.
description: (1) Variables were reformatted to match the data. (2)
 Outliers in var_013, var_014, var_015, and var_026 were recoded per PI
instruction.