Dealing with questions of war and peace and understanding the causes of interstate conflict is a primary goal of the field of international relations. In order to study interstate conflict in a rigorous manner, scholars have relied on established rules and procedures for gathering information...

This article focuses on the definition of states-an issue that has been a central concern for the Correlates of War Project in particular and international relations in general. The paper argues that we need to move away from the crude dichotomous conceptualization of state system membership,...

Militarized interstate disputes are united historical cases of conflict in which the threat, display or use of military force short of war by one member state is explicitly directed towards the government, official representatives, official forces, property, or territory of another state....