My name is Michael Weaver, and I am political science undergraduate the University of Chicago. I am currently working on a project in which I hope to investigate whether theories about the use violence in non-ethnic civil wars also hold in purportedly "ethnic" civil wars. In particular, I hope to evaluate these hypotheses by looking at Iraq. One of the theories I would like to test is Stathis Kalyvas's argument about how insurgent and incumbent control determine the use of selective or indiscriminate violence. I plan to test this hypothesis by examining variation in violence across both neighborhoods in Baghdad and across cities, towns, and villages throughout Iraq between 2005 and 2007. Unfortunately, I am unaware of any systematic collection of data on the degree to which militia or insurgent groups exercised control over territory (either at the neighborhood or town/village level) in Iraq.

Does anyone know if such systematic data exists, and if so, who I should contact to either obtain it, or attempt to obtain it (seeing as it is highly probable such information would not be publicly available)?

Assuming either the non-existence or unavailability of such data on control, I plan to collect data myself. I am currently using media reports from both major newspapers and Iraqslogger.com to come up with a rough coding scheme for control over neighborhoods in Baghdad. Are there any other resources that anyone would recommend for information on the degree to which militias/insurgent groups exercised control over particular neighborhoods in Baghdad or towns/villages/regions across Iraq?

(Note: I do have intermediate Arabic reading skills and potential access to someone familiar with Iraqi dialect)


On a related note: I am also interested in obtaining access to disaggregated figures on both violent attacks and civilian deaths in Iraq from the SIGACTS database. I initially contacted the MNF-Iraq press desk seeking information about what was available and what was not. After 2 months of back and forth I was told that they did not have the disaggregated data I was looking for. If anyone has suggestions about who I should contact about the possibility of obtaining this data, I would greatly appreciate any leads, particularly if I could be directed to people in the military involved in the data collection operation or in data analysis.