Ryan Griffiths, professor of political science, has received a $442,321 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in support of his research on global war patterns.

Griffiths is the principal investigator on the three-year project, titled “Global Patterns in Interstate and Intrastate War Since 1750.” The project falls under NSF’s umbrella of security and preparedness research and seeks to fill in the gaps on global war data between and among states since the 18th century.

Griffiths’ particular focus on global patterns seeks to address how “data-driven work on conflict prior to the early 20th century is centered on Europe and ignores hundreds of independent states in other parts of the world,” says Griffiths.

Beyond creating a publicly available conflict dataset, Griffiths’ aim is to analyze the frequency of war over time around the world and determine if certain regions of the globe are more peaceful than others. He is also interested in the frequency of war fought within a state compared to war fought between states, and whether one type has increased over time more than the other.

Griffiths’ NSF project model will build out his previously conducted research from the International Systems Dataset, a multi-part register of 482 sovereign states’ development from 1816 until 2016, by adding historical data on combatant and battle fatalities. He hopes the project will ultimately contribute to academic understanding of the causes of war and long-term trends in warfare.

Griffiths is the research co-director of international and intra-state conflict through the Program for the Advancement of Research on Conflict and Collaboration.

By Sophia Moore