APPENDIX B
WATER CONFLICT AND COOPERATION EVENT DATA SETS INTRODUCTION Conflict studies in recent years have increasingly employed national and subnational event data sets to examine causes and consequences of conflict (Ide 2018; Bernauer and Böhmelt 2020; Döring 2020). This report, and in particular chapter 2, follows this approach and relies extensively on event databases to study the relationship between water and conflict in the Middle East and North Africa. While both data sets used in this study have been vetted and widely used in the academic and policy literature, it is important to acknowledge their limitations and carry out additional tests to assess if these limitations have any major impact on the result. This appendix presents additional results from two of the event data sets used in this report and demonstrates that overall findings are robust to alternative ways of curating the data sets.
WATER-RELATED INTRASTATE CONFLICT AND COOPERATION DATABASE Limitations exist in the Water-Related Intrastate Conflict and Cooperation (WARICC) database,1 warranting some data curation and examination of subsets of the full sample to ensure that overall results are consistent and coherent despite these limitations. First, a large share of events in this database are georeferenced to capital cities because events for which geolocation data were not available were assigned to capital cities (Bernauer et al. 2012). This higher number of events located in cities is also likely due to greater
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