Over the last two decades, the quantitative study of civil war has gained prominence in the literature of political science. Analyses of large-scale databases have provided for fruitful cross-country comparisons. In particular, statistical analysis has yielded new insights into the causes of civil war, the forces impacting its duration, and the factors shaping its termination. The quantitative data that exist, however, have limited the questions scholars have been able to ask about civil war. Specifically, researchers have focused on “civil war” as the unit of analysis. At this level, databases are composed of country-level indicators including whether there was a civil war, how long it lasted, when it came to an end, and a set of political and economic indicators of country-level characteristics.

Without more fine-grained information, it is impossible to examine systematically an additional set of issues, including the geographic spread of civil war, the variation in the incidence of civil war over time, and the characteristics of civil war violence. These characteristics include the types of violence committed by soldiers during a conflict, their prevalence, the location of violence, and the details about the victims.

Scholars interested in quantitative research should not be limited to studies of the structural determinants of civil war initiation, duration, and termination. While studies of the incidence and character of civil war violence have traditionally been conducted largely by anthropologists and sociologists, it is feasible to develop a method for the systematic collection of cross-national quantitative data on the incidence and character of civil war.